Week 2

Day 8

So today I set out for Kanazawa, a city in mid-Japan that is known for having preserved much of the older style of building and lifestyle. To get there I got to take a bullet train, Shinkansen in Japanese. It was fast but not amazingly fast, and the food was excellent. Too bad our trucking lobbyists have ruined the train system or we could have these in the US.

Now there's a "Super Shinkansen" that's even faster. And I'm told that they've developed a magnetic train that can go at ridiculous speeds, but they can't figure out how to make it turn. This isn't an insurmountable problem -- the Japanese tend to go through mountains rather than build around them (apparently due to corruption) and so they might just decide to build a straight line of track from one city to another.

On the train, I noticed once again something that I had been observing all week. In Japan, people are much more polite about their cellular phones. They never scream into them the way people all over America do, and they never talk on them in a train car or at a restaurant. If someone needs to make a phone call, they go stand between cars or in the lobby or somewhere where they won't disturb other people. Also, everyone's phone everywhere is set to vibrate, and there are signs on the train asking that everyone do that. I'm not sure why this is -- I guess part of it is that Japanese society encourages people to be more considerate. Also, since *everyone* has a cellular phone, they're not such a status symbol, so people don't think they're automatically cool by talking on them.

There are a number of reasons why cellular phones are so much more common in Japan -- the large disposable income of young people probably has something to do with it -- but probably a big part of it is the difficulty in acquiring a home phone line. There's only one phone company in Japan, NTT, and they don't exactly make it easy. Getting a phone line can cost as much as $700 and can take 6 months to have it installed. At that point, in some way that I don't entirely understand, you "own" that phone line. You can move and have it move with you, or you can sell it to someone else. The system is very confusing -- even people who've lived in Japan for a while don't seem to understand it.

Cell phones in Japan are way more advanced than the ones we have in the US. Voice quality is much better, and all the phones I saw could do neat things like take color photos, send email, etc. And play games. All the phones have big color backlit screens. NTT's cellular subsidiary DoCoMo just announced their latest innovation, 3rd Generation phones, which can transmit live color video so that you can see the person to whom you're talking.

I arrived at a Ryokan, which is a traditional-style Japanese inn. This means that you have to change your footwear about a thousand times to do anything. When you walk in, you take off your sneakers and put on slippers. You wear these in the hallway, but if you try to wear them inside your room an old man appears and yells at you. If you're in your room and need to go to the bathroom, you have to put on your slippers, go to the bathroom, change your slippers for "toilet slippers" , stare at the Japanese characters that presumably mean "Men" and "Women" for a while, change back to regular slippers, go to your room, take off your slippers, get the guidebook, put on your slippers, go to the bathroom, change into toilet slippers, compare characters for 15 minutes, conclude that neither character is in the guidebook, pick a random door, apologize profusely, go into the other door, discover that it's a "traditional toilet" which is code for "hole in the ground" , attempt to use the hole in a fairly comical manner, put on regular slippers, return to room.

One thing I can say for the Ryokan, they know their food. A stay in the inn included a "traditional" breakfast and dinner. Dinner turned out to be a special sort of meal, called Kaiseki, which was made up of a large number of small courses. On the first night, we got crab, sashimi, rice, 2 kinds of soup, tempura, a gelatin dessert, fruit, chicken, and two types of giant snails. It was all excellent. I kept the snail shells.

The inn had a fairly early curfew so rather than run around Kanazawa all night, I decided to stay in and try to catch some Japanese TV (of course the traditional inn had a TV. It was "traditional" though -- no satellite dish). I found what I think must have been the Japanese equivalent of Candid Camera -- they showed a mother and son ordering in a restaurant. The mother's cell phone rang so she went to the entrance to talk and while she was gone, they slipped the son something with shrimp. I guess he was allergic to shrimp because he coughed, screamed and passed out, and got this terrible rash. The mother came running, looked in the thing, saw the shrimp, and started to panic. The next scene was in the hospital. I don't understand anything that was said, but the kid seemed to be mostly OK, though hooked up to lots of equipment.

If it was a joke, I don't get it. Maybe if I spoke Japanese.

Note: in Japan you're allowed to smoke in the hospital.

In the next scene, a guy walked into a department store dressed in pajamas. He asked to be shown the electric toothbrushes and when he saw them, grabbed one, put toothpaste on it and tried to brush his teeth. The salesman attacked him and tried to wrestle it away.

I tried to go to sleep. My pillow was made of rice husks. Great.

Day 9

I don't think I like traditional Japanese breakfast food. It seems to be similar to traditional Japanese dinner, only without the snails. We had rice, soup, fried fish, and pickles.

More Japanese TV. There's this obese guy and these students and a nurse. The nurse is applying some sort of electric device to the fat parts of the guy. I gather it's supposed to help him lose weight. It seems to hurt -- the students keep grabbing it and putting it on his cheeks. The female student keeps rubbing the device on her ass. OK, now they've got the big guy in a glass case, he's got a breathing tube and they're filling the tube with some sort of murky gas.

They've taken him to a pool and they're making him rub his belly underwater. Ok. Now they've weighed him again -- apparently all this has made him lose 4.2 kilograms. Now they strange part: they brought him to a restaurant and they weighed out 4.2 kilograms of steak. He ate it. I have absolutely no idea what happened. No one I talked to could explain.

Soft drink machine slogan: "Try some once in the strictly selected high quality products."

Kanazawa has this thing called the Kenrokuen, which is a really big and fancy garden. It's really densly laid out, I guess because of the scarcity of space. The trees in this garden are pruned in a way as to make them very weak (because it's believed to be more decorative) so each winter they get these special supports to help them hold up the weight of the snow.

I then watched a TV show where they had a contest to see who could create the cutest outfit for a dog. And then, another weight loss show. This time they had 4 women, and all 4 were weighed and then put through a vigorous series of exercises. After lots of exercise and special breathing, they weighed them again. Each woman was then given exactly the amount IN CHOCOLATE of weight that she lost. They all ate it. This is entirely beyond my comprehension.

A man in drag teaching a pre-school class. Oh wait: T2 in Japanese. Score.

Day 10

Enough Kanazawa. I'm ready to go on to Aogoki, the small town where my friend Dan teaches English. To get there, I need to take a train to Kyoto, then another train to Osaka, then another to Kaibara, then a bus to Aogoki. It's in the middle of nowhere, in a little valley. The town itself has about 8000 people.

When you hang up a Japanese pay phone, a little LCD woman bows to you.

There's a sect of Buddhism in Japan called the Jodo Shinshu sect which says that you don't need to be an ascetic or a vegetarian or celibate to achieve Nirvana -- you just need to chant "Namu Amida Butsu" repeatedly. This sect has 12 million followers. Sounds like Buddhism for Dummies to me, but who am I to judge?

I'm a good way into the middle of nowhere, and the houses are still really small and cramped and close together. Interesting. Every small town the train passes through looks like a sedate, charming little town -- with a giant glowing flashing superfrenetic neon pachinko parlor.

Japan is very mountainous -- I guess for the same reason that it has a lot of earthquakes. The mountains must be too hard to terrace, so they're treed over and the areas between them are mostly rice. Aogoki is itself in a mountain valley, and it apparently known for the quality of its rice.

Finally got to Dan's house. He has a sweet house -- apparently people in Japan tend to be surprised that he has his own house, job, etc. Most people in Japan live with their parents until they're at least 26 -- part of the reason why there's so much disposable income, I guess.

Dan also has satellite TV -- it doesn't seem like there's much cable here. So we got to watch Friends in Japanese. It should come as no surprise that you don't lose anything. We also got to see Simpsons in Japanese. Heh.

Dan is an Assistant Language Teacher at a Japanese High School. High School in Japan covers the same ages as ours, except that Freshman year is part of Junior High School. When you're in your last year of junior high, you apply to the high schools that you think you can get into -- like college. There are schools that take everyone, and everyone has to go to high school, so the system works out. No one I talked to knows what happens if you don't get into any of the schools to which you apply.

Dan's school is one of the one's that takes everyone, so the students aren't exactly the cream of the crop. Some of them have what are probably undiagnosed learning disabilities. Others just aren't academically gifted. One teacher described it as a "juvenlie detention center."

It goes without saying, but I had to put on slippers to enter school.

This school is beautifully landscaped, with a tasteful courtyard featuring things that would have been stolen from my high school in minutes.

Schools in Japan have no insulation or heating, so in the winter everyone wears winter coats in class. At least, no public schools have these things, and more than 95% of kids are in public school. Some kids also go to cram school, which is a special set of classes you take after regular school to help you memorize things. This is necessary if you want to get into a good college, and there's only one -- Todai, Tokyo University. Without exception, all top officials in the Japanese government and top executives in the large companies graduated from Todai. The exam is, I'm told, largely memorization -- questions like "The Brest-Litovsk Pact was signed in what year?" Hence, if you want to go to Todai, you need to go to cram school. Every year when the lists of who got in are posted, there are suicides.

The kids in this school have no hope of getting into Todai, and I'm laughed at for asking. Dan let me go to a few of his classes so I could see for myself. First of all, Japanese high school kids remind me of American junior high school kids. Not just that they look much younger than they are, or that they're all in cute little uniforms, but more their social behavior. The boys all sit with each other, the girls all sit with each other. They're very boisterous before class, but during it they're almost entirely inanimate.

My first class is a fifth year English class. Immediately I detect a problem: it's not taught in English. I later discovered that no English classes are taught in English. I'm beginning to understand how a nation where everyone must take English classes can produce things like ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US.

So first the teacher says some stuff in Japanese about how a particular English phrase works. Then Dan says something -- usually just a word, sometimes a whole sentence -- and everyone repeats it. 4 times. You might think, hey, they're trying to learn English and Dan is a native speaker -- maybe they should... speak to him? But no. Just endless repetition. They go through this maybe 10 or 15 times.

Then they're told to pair up, one person will ask questions, one will answer them. To my surprise, every pair used Rock Paper Scissors (Jun Kun Pon) to decide who would ask. No one threw Bunny. I guess it wasn't important enough.

Finally they line up to ask questions to me and Dan. I don't know about Dan, but all the kids who were supposed to ask me questions were way too nervous or embarrased to actually ask me anything. They'd stand there for a few seconds and giggle (the default Japanese response to everything), then they'd mutter a tiny bit, then they'd turn to the person behind them and say a few things in Japanese, then they'd turn to me, start to talk, giggle again, and time would be up. One kid, who acted like the class punk, managed after a lot of giggling and staring at his shoes to say "you like baseball?" I said "Yes I do. Do you?" and he was so unbearably embarrased that he had to go to the end of the line early. One other kid managed to squeak out a question, but he said it so quietly that it sounded like "Do you like to smell the teacher?" Dan says that it is possible that this is what he said.

To help explain why these kids couldn't form a coherent sentence despite five years of English classes, Dan let me look at their textbook. I would describe it as "tragic." We spent a few minutes looking for the funniest page, but it ended up a 20-way tie.

I don't want to give the impression that these kids were shy all the time. That was only towards me. To each other and the teacher, they were quite different. It was like an American class, only more so -- kids talk in class, pass notes, sleep, act impudent, etc. At one point, the teacher misspelled something (OK, she put a line in the wrong place in a Kanji character) and a kid yelled something that Dan tells me means "Try your hardest!"

High school kids in Japan aren't allowed to wear anything that they could use to differentiate themselves -- make-up, hair dye, jewelry, etc. The schools take responsibility for student behavior even outside school hours -- teachers go to festivals, for example, to watch for misbehaving kids.

Dan took me to another one of his classes, but warned me that the teacher was a bit more serious than the last one, so I wouldn't get to participate. Instead, he suggested that I count the number of kids who fall asleep. Of the 13 kids in the class, 10 fell asleep -- 76.9% (I was very bored). The teacher didn't seem too concerned; he walked by sleeping kids and did nothing.

Another reason why these kids don't speak English: their teachers don't speak English. This guy tried to talk to me a few times, but I just didn't get it.

After lunch (something called a Bento Box, I think Bento is the Japanese word for goat feces), we got word that the Principal wanted to chat with me. His English was reasonably good -- compared to his countrymen, A+. Over coffee, he explained that US schools weren't doing well and we tried to copy from the Japanese. But then he told me that US schools were very good and we shouldn't copy from the Japanese. He explained that Japanese schools are terrible, and that they need to copy from us. He had some manuals with SAT scores to which he kept pointing, but they were in Japanese. Then he showed me how to write anthrax in Kanji. I forgot. He also noted, "Our students are not like the Japanese students you have in the states, yes?"

After school, Dan took me to a meeting of the English Speaking Society which, of course, does not speak English. I do get a special treat though: there's a recitation contest coming up, so I get to listen to three girls repeating fables. The way it works is, a girl recites a second grade level Aesop-style fable with a moral like "easier said than done" and then Dan and the teacher tell her which words she's mispronouncing, and then she does it again. I later found out that one of them won the contest.

I'm overall struck by the beauty of Aogoki. The countryside in general here is beautifully verdant, the air clear, the rice paddies... I don't know, very ricy. For dinner we had Kitenzushi again. Yum. They get very few foreigners here, it's kinda fun for me. Dan says that one of the fun things about being in a town like this one is being an instant celebrity. People never forget your name, for example -- you're the only white guy for 100 miles. He's always getting beer bought for him. I walked by a dog and it just freaked out, Dan says it does that for him too.

Aogoki apparently has a bit of an inbreeding problem. Dan tells me that 30% of the city has the same last name. I thought that this might explain the school, but it turns out that kids come from other towns to go to this school.

Day 12

Once again I get to go to classes with Dan. In between trying not to laugh at the irony of Dan having to explain the phrase "mutual understanding" to people who just don't get it and looking things up in the "Fresh Genius" dictionary, I count sleeping people.

I got to visit a post office this morning. When the Japanese were building the modern Japanese state, they sent delegates all over the world to study foreign institutions in order to serve as models. They chose the British Royal Mail as their model for a postal system. Thus, like in Britain, a post office is also a sort of bank where people keep their money. I don't understand, and no one has ever been able to explain, the connection between post offices and savings accounts.

But it's good that they're linked, because post office ATMs are just about the only ATMs in the country that will take foreign ATM cards. Sometimes. It's kinda hit or miss.

For reasons unknown, everything in the post office is in two languages: Japanese and French. There's also a sensor that triggers a recording of "thank you very much" when you walk through the door. Shipping in Japan is very fast and reasonably cheap -- they apologized to Dan that his package to the other side of the country would not arrive until tomorrow.

It's stinkbug season in Japan, I'm told, so I can't kill any bugs unless I know for sure that they're not stinkbugs.

Speaking of killing things, environmentalism in Japan is very odd. As mentioned earlier, the Japanese continue to kill whales despite all treaties to the contrary. They incinerate most of their trash, but all garbage is separated so that they don't burn plastic. Allegedly. What actually happens a lot, I'm told, is that the recycling and the trash are thrown in together and burnt.

On the train over here, I saw a number of large heaps of burning stuff. I wasn't sure what to make of them; Dan tells me that when people in the countryside have trash, rather than figure out where to truck it they just set it on fire.

Oh well, back to school. I go watch the English Speaking Society speak Japanese a bit. They're meeting in a science room, and I notice something interesting about the stuff written on the blackboard: all the technical stuff is in English. There will be a long scrawl of Japanese characters and then the letters DNA and then some more Japanese. Also, chemical formulas are in English, like NH3.

One reason why Japanese people have so much trouble with English is the dearth of sounds in their language. Japanese has less than 80 sounds in total, and only 8 vowel sounds. English, on the other hand, featues a much richer spectrum of sounds, only two or three short of the full International Phonetic Alphabet range. Thus, when Japanese people try to learn English, they not only have to learn a new set of vocabulary, grammar and style rules, but they also have to learn to form sounds (like "ell") that they never have before.

Virtually all of the teachers in Dan's school smoke. In fact, far more Japanese people smoke than do Americans. Note also that they believe vegetarianism to be unhealthy.

Day 13

Time to visit Kyoto, so I hop back on the train system. Unfortunately, Aogoki is too small to have a bullet train, so it takes me about 3 hours to get there. Having been raised in New York, when waiting in a train station I periodically stand on the edge of a platform and look down to try to see if there's a train in sight. No one in Japan ever does this, and today a conductor actually yelled at me for it. (At least, I think he was yelling at me for it -- he could have been saying "Yes! Good thinking, looking for the train! I will have to try that!" or even "How dare you enter my train station without putting on slippers!") But I guess in Japan you don't have to look because trains are always on time.

Again I'm reminded of how nice people in Japan are. All I have to do is look at a train schedule and try to appear confused and someone will approach me and offer to help.

Foreigners in Japan should know that if they are involved with the police, the judge will want to know how much and how sincerely the initial apologies were. Apparently when the police are involved in a crime situation, it is the duty of everyone involved to them to apologize profusely, and the police will tell the judge if they do not apologize enough.

But this is fairly irrelevant, because foreigners in Japan are encouraged not to call the police except in life or death situations. The police apparently are not interested in helping foreigners. And if they are called, life does not go well for gaijin who have trouble with Japanese people. My brother told me about someone he knows who got into a bar fight with a Japanese guy over a year ago and is still in prison. Awaiting trial.

Good thing the Japanese are so polite.

First thing I saw in Kyoto (besides the train station) was a haircut place advertising that its haircuts are "Made in USA" . I can tell already I'm not going to like Kyoto.

My general impression of Kyoto is that it's dull. The city lacks Tokyo's excellent public transportation system, so getting around the city is either difficult or expensive. It's overly polluted and not especially colorful. It also seems to lack Tokyo's frenetic urgency; the character of the city just seems grayer.

I did find one wonderful district, a shopping area whose name escapes me. The street has served as an entertainment district for over 300 years and yet manages to stay current. After some kitenzushi I ducked into a few arcades to observe some of the video games.

Japanese gamers seem way more interested in moving than do American players. The arcades are filled with games like the "running game" where you apparently get on a treadmill and run as fast as you can for as long as you can, and things on the screen run away from you. There's also the "drumming game" where you drum in rhythm to a computerized band (miss too many beats and you're out) and a "guitar game" . I also saw a horseracing game, where 10 people sit at consoles placing bets, and then a computer-generated horse race is shown.

Dinner was Teppen Age, which is tempura only harder because you have to do it yourself. And it's really unhealthy. At the Teppen Age place the guy at the next table had a beard. He was the first Japanese guy with a beard that I saw, and throughout my trip I only saw one other. Apparently they believe that facial hair makes you look evil. Score.

Took a taxi back to the hotel.

Taxis in Japan are an experience. Unfortunately, they're an expensive experience. Minimum charge Y660 ($6) plus another Y80 ($.70) for every 273 meters, and I have no idea what that means but it's a lot of Yen.

But it's hard not to take taxis in Japan, especially Tokyo. First of all, there are very few street names -- only the major streets have names. Instead, every building has a three number address. The first number is the Chome, which is a sort of district. The second number is a block -- all the blocks in a Chome are numbered, at times even consecutively. The third number is a building number.

So you take the train to your Chome, and then if you're lucky there's a map that shows you where the block you need is. Now you have to find the building. Problem is, buildings aren't numbered consecutively the way they are in the US -- instead, they're numbered based on the order they were built. Clearly this is stupid. So you end up walking around a lot.

Tokyo is really hard to get around, to the point where natives often have trouble finding things. Most of the taxis that I was in had a laptop mounted on the dashboard that had a GPS system running, and most of them still couldn't find anything.

Day 14

The Japanese are fastidious about cleanliness. On a bus I got onto this morning, someone was cleaning the railings.

Today I'm going to Nara, which is the tourist trap to end all tourist traps. It's essentially a giant concentration of temples, shrines and white people. There're also, for some unexplained reason, 1500 deer which roam freely throughout the city.

The first thing I noticed about Nara is that there are speakers on the telephone poles which are blaring Christmas Music. It's November 1st. Hmm. Second thing I noticed is a cafe called "Cafe Drink Drank" .

I stopped at a few of the temples to read some of the prayers -- at Buddhist temples, people write prayers down and hang them for people to see. OK, they probably hang them for the Buddha to see or something. Most people prayed for general happiness, success, or wealth. One kid prayed for luck on his SATs. And Katie Mc wrote "I will be a veterinarian when I grow up."

As the guidebook promised, this town is filled with deer. They're very domesticated, little stands sell "deer cooky" which you can feed to them if you want them to follow you around forever. All the male deer have thier horns cut off. I noticed that these horns are for sale at nearby stores.

There are so many tourists in Nara that apparently Japanese schoolkids come here on class trips to practice their English. Four times I was approached by a group of schoolkids who wanted to ask me various questions, usually where I was from and what Japanese foods I liked. One group even wanted to take my picture.

Like everywhere in Japan, Nara has a giant statue of the Buddha. Near it is a pillar with a hole in it. Legend has it that if you can fit through the pillar, you are on the path to enlightenment. Score.

Dinner was French food. Excellent meal, a little place called Cafe L'Intimat buried in the shopping district.