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7.28.2003 Only 12 more days until we're officially back home. We'll be in Minnesota August 9th-19th, and then in New Hampshire August 19th-28th. I want you all to know we love our lives in Japan, BUT we just can't wait to smother all of you with hugs and kisses! Please don't go up to the cabin, fly off to Vegas, or have to work OT because we are ready for a Chipotle eating, lakes walking, pedicure getting, beverage sipping, karaoke singing, brat chomping, dancing under the light of the moon, wonderful time. Same goes for me, except for all the kissing and smothering. .: posted by Julie Cannon 10:47 PM Tokyo Time 7.27.2003 I've put up a new photo album of our farewell party for the JETs that are leaving this town. Kampai! (Zander here) Also, here's a great link that the world famous Shad Land sent us. Takkyu! .: posted by Julie Cannon 11:26 AM Tokyo Time 7.21.2003 You might notice over on the right hand side of our page here that there are some small links. Those will take you to other weblogs that are written in, and presumably about, Japan. Enjoy! .: posted by Zander Cannon 11:42 AM Tokyo Time 7.17.2003 First off, you might have noticed that you can add comments to this weblog now! Thanks to Shad, we're able to read what's on your mind right away. Last night was the formal farewell enkai(party) for the JETs in my office who are going home soon. Six of us decided to wear yukkattas (summer kimonos) as a tribute to this fine country we're in. My friend and co-worker, Mrs. Matsumoto, showed me how to put it on, and fold it in a way that made it the right length for me. She reminded me to walk like a real Japanese woman, with my feet straight ahead and taking small steps, not like a cowgirl just off her horse. A few of the girls met at Trisha's house to get ready together, and a friend of hers was there to help us put on the kimonos. Her friend has 2 sons that are all grown up, so she was quite happy to dress five girls for the night. She kept calling us her daughters! One of the most interesting points of the night was being in a kimono with other gaijins (foreigners) and walking down Orion Dori, which is a popular outdoor mall in the heart of Utsunomiya. There were several groups of high school girls that giggled and chanted "kawaii!" (cute) and lots and lots of curious, jaw-dropping looks. The people who are leaving all gave speeches, usually half in Japanese for our bosses, and half in English for the rest of us. It was really touching to see everyone up there sharing memories about the year. It was Trisha's speech that really brought tears to everyone's eyes. She had something sweet to say to every one of us. Unfortunately, I can't write what she said to me because my mom reads this, and it's embarassing! It was a bitter-sweet night to see other's journeys come full-circle. There are days when I wish we were coming home for good too, but there are so many more days that I see the wealth in this opportunity called Japan. It's so different than anything I'd ever imagined and I'm not finished exploring yet. Really, I can't stress it enough, if you're interested in Japan at all, come and visit us! We're getting pretty good and getting around, and there's just so much to see. It truly is amazing. I'll try and post a photo album of last night sometime this weekend. .: posted by Julie Cannon 11:24 AM Tokyo Time 7.10.2003 Julie of the italics says: Yesterday was quite a day. As a teacher, I usually start getting a little itch right around the beginning of May. I know that school'll be out in about a month, and honestly, it's about time. Well...school is year 'round here, so I've had this itch for a while now. (Zander believes its better to scratch around an itch. I think that's crap. I'm not satisfied until there's a little blood.) Yesterday...I'm only required to work a half day on Wednesdays, so at about 1:30 I threw my backback into my bicycle basket and headed out. It wasn't raining, I was free, and I was looking forward to coming home and hanging out with Zander. If it hasn't been mentioned before, some roads in Japan are really narrow. (If you're following the arc of the story, you'll know that something bad's about to happen.) This particular road was extremely narrow and had flooded rice fields on both sides. Fortunately, for a huge portion of my commute to school it's only me and the crows. Yesterday a turquoise mini-van joined us. I'm way more polite in Japan than I am at home, so I got off of my bike and got as close as I could to the rice field, without falling in, and waved the driver through. Really, there was enough room to scrape by, carefully. Well, she drove off of the road a little too far and and her left two tires started to sink. Then she gunned it and those tires really sunk. At that point, the van was at a 45 degree angle and I was really getting nervous. Her and I did everything we could to get that van out. We pushed, pulled, rocked, tried to build a bridge...nothing worked, so I asked her if she had a cell phone while I pulled mine out and offered it to her. She had her own, but didn't want to call anyone. (I wonder if this sort of thing has happened to her before?) So we did nothing for about 5 minutes until I just couldn't stand it any longer, and I called Zander. When I saw him riding up on his rusty old Giant with shorts and Tivas on, he might as well have been flying and wearing a cape. Or tights. He was Superman. He hopped into the field, up to his knees in muck and rice, and started to push from the side of the van while I pushed from behind. We tried all kinds of rescue tactics, but the van was stuck in the kind of way that forces the rear axil to grind into the road. She still didn't want to call anyone. So I rode my bike back to Mizuhono, leaving Zander and the driver, and told my friend, Mrs. Matsumoto, the situation. She couldn't believe that the woman hadn't called JAF (just like AAA), and wrote down the number for her. She also wrote her a note in Japanese telling her to call someone, and maybe that Zander and I are really nice people and she shouldn't be so afraid of us. Well, she finally called JAF and sent us on our way. (Both Zander and I had to work last night.) Yesterday was quite a day. Yesterday all of us kept our cool, even with other places to go and people to see. With all the cases of road rage that we read about, I feel lucky to have only been inconvenienced for an afternoon. I feel completely safe in Japan. If anything at all, some of the people that I've run into are a little bit passive-aggressive, but usually just shy and smaller than me. But I do worry about moving back to Minnesota and facing the same type of situation with the new gun laws in effect. Yuck. .: posted by Zander Cannon 6:58 PM Tokyo Time 7.8.2003 Yearly Report Our one-year anniversary of arriving in Japan fast approaches us, and it occurs to me that we should take stock of our situation. What have we accomplished? What were we supposed to accomplish? Is someone going to be grading us? Let's run down the list, shall we, in reverse order of importance. Japanese Ability The other day, I came across a Spanish website on the internet, and I was surprised that I found it rather easy to understand. Granted, I did study Spanish for many years in school, but it's been almost ten years since I have done anything with it, so it caught me off-guard. Then I realized, wait a second, that's because Spanish is easy! Sentence structure is the same as English, practically every word can be kind of recognized as being related to some Latin-derived English word, and the big surprise for students of the language is that you must remember that ...adjectives come AFTER the nouns. Let me tell you, after studying Japanese for a year or so, this is what I have to say to that: Whoopty ding. Japanese is so backwards and topsy-turvy from English, you sometimes don't know where to start. And of course, you can't read anything when you start, either. That said, I'm slowly getting to the point that I can say most things that I need to say to people with at least passable grammar (I think), and I can kind of understand the simplest of children's comics. I can have an extremely simple (but long) conversation with my Japanese teacher, and the only drawback is that I have a headache for 30 minutes after that! The most delicate thing about learning a language is how good you feel like you are. I might feel like I don't know a single thing about Japanese, but then one day I have to ask the man at the supermarket where I might find sugar-free iced coffee, and realize that I actually know how to say it. And if he understands me, I feel like Jack Ryan from those Tom Clancy novels. Of course, an hour later, someone will ask me the simplest thing and I won't have the first clue what they are talking about. It's like, I'm always worse than I think I am on my good days, and I'm always better than I think I am on my bad days. I never seem to have any medium days, though, where I think I'm about medium good, and I'm right. Career Advancement I'm working on the long-awaited Smax miniseries with Alan Moore, which will no doubt be a great boon to my career when it comes out, but I'm sure I have put the brakes on my career by living in Japan for two years. I've thought about it some, and figured that I'd rather have to restart my career after having spent two years in Japan than not. I hope I feel that way in summer '04. Culture Shock About a month back, I decided that I wanted to be able to watch Region 2 (Japan) DVDs on my Region 1 (North America) DVD-ROM player in my computer. For those of you unfamiliar with DVD Region coding, it's to prevent (or slow down) piracy by insuring that only Japanese players can play Japanese DVDs, and only US and Canadian players can play US and Canadian DVDs. I'm sure if you stay in any one of these countries, you'd never know or care, but here, Julie and I have US Region 1 DVDs we brought with us and a rental store full of Region 2 DVDs near us, and the computer will only allow you to change the region coding 5 times (just in case you made a mistake the first time). So what I did was download a program that changes the computer's firmware. Ok, you've heard of software, the stuff you put in your computer, that can be changed around and added to, etc. And you've heard of hardware, the computer itself, which pretty much stays as it is. Well, I only recently found out that firmware, which is somewhere in between, is hardware based, but can be changed, like software. The region coding of the DVD-ROM is set in the firmware, and the process of changing it is a pretty root-level process. I mean, you know computers these days; every noise they make is in stereo, and sounds like a chorus of frogs or a starship acknowledgement; but when I ran the program that changed this firmware, the computer just went "beep." Maybe it was a "ding", but it sounded like the sounds computers made in 1979, or the sound a toaster makes when your toast is done. My point is, the noise sounded like it came from pretty low down on the processing chain, kind of like the computer's brain-stem. And you could tell from the very basic acknowledgement I got from the computer, and from that beep, that something was really different. This wasn't just moving some files around or creating a new folder. Something was different. This is what culture shock is like. I should say, getting over culture shock is like that. Over the course of the year, Julie and I had serious ups and downs regarding Japan and Japanese culture (and Japanese weather, Japanese crows outside our windows, Japanese shrieking cats, Japanese cockroaches, etc.). And although we both went in with a good attitude and a willingness to see it through, it can be very difficult to stay centered and able to remember what your original intentions when everything is different. There's nothing you can tell your conscious mind that will make getting used to the culture any easier, much as you might try. There is, however, a subtle change that you begin to notice, in the back of your mind, down by the brainstem, where suddenly you can foresee what people say in a certain situation, just like you could in the US. Suddenly when someone does something that is extraordinarily Japanese, like bow when saying goodbye to someone on the phone, which would seem ludicrous in the US, it seems ...somehow... normal. I suppose it's simply a matter of accepting that this place is our home for the time being, and that just as we would accept the idiotic things people do in the US as a matter of course, so we will here. Next: Social Detachment .: posted by Zander Cannon 3:50 PM Tokyo Time 7.7.2003 Julie of the Italics says... If you're interested in really, really easy bonsai growing, check out this website. I went to a party last week where there was a bonsai tree about 3 feet tall that was more than fifty years old! Bonsai Tree Site .: posted by Zander Cannon 2:38 PM Tokyo Time 7.5.2003 Julie of the Italics says... Here are a few recent school stories...Three 8th grade boys follow me around during our daily school cleaning time. Nasu Kun, Mama Pineapple and Eros Kun. Nasu Kun practices his English by listing all the ways of stating "you are a crazy woman." These are his latest (and greatest): "You are number one crazy woman." "You are the queen of crazy women." "You are the most craziest woman in the world." Nasu Kun means Eggplant Boy. He told me that he's called this because his head looks like an eggplant. I think that there'll be some serious issues for him and vegetables later in life. The next boy is Mama Pineapple. The Japanese word for so-so is ma-ma. He kind-of likes pineapple, so he insists that I call him this. It really cracks him up. It also really cracks me up. Finally there is Eros Kun. At first when the boys were telling me his name, I had no idea what they were saying. ARROWS? A ROWS? What? I guess it became the most clear when they told me that he lub-lubs many girls. (Students commonly ask me if I lub-lub Zander. I assume this means love, so I say yes. I hope I haven't damaged anyone yet!) He (Eros Kun) blushed at this, but admitted that it's true, he does in fact, lub-lub many girls.  I can't remember the boy on the left's name, but the boy in the middle is Nasu Kun and the boy on the right is Eros Kun. This picture was taken at our sports day. We'll post an album of that soon. Picture a classroom filled with students all in their crisp uniforms. It's quiet and serious because exams are coming up in a few weeks. They're taking notes and I'm walking through the rows making comments on what they're writing. "Good job." "No sleeping." "Beautiful." Then I walked over to Mori Kun. He was skillfully rendering the word EMINEM on his desk with an exacto blade. He's not a bad kid, but I do have to say that Mori and I have come a long way. He's one of those boys that can go cross-eyed and then make his eyeballs shake. For my first six months in Japan he would only speak to me with his eyes crossed and shaking...and only to call me Fry Pan Joe-Ri, which is the name of a pub near our school. (Only recently I've found out that this really funny to both teachers and students!) Weird. Ok, Mori Kun was doing his "art" with one hand and flipping off the boy next to him with the other, all while smiling sweetly at me. While the middle finger has absolutely no significance to Japanese people, Mori thought I might find it significant. As a "cultural representative" of the U.S. I thought it was really important not to giggle. I told him to put away his art and take some notes. He did with one hand; the other was still busy. Erai desu ne. Well behaved, huh? .: posted by Zander Cannon 6:24 PM Tokyo Time 
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