9/30/08
Nakatani Apartment, Nagoya

Today was my first day to go to Labo Center alone, and wouldn't you know it, the route we took yesterday was blocked off by construction. I got around ok, but pushed the clock a little more than I would have liked.

Ono, my scheduler, was out on a business trip today. The other coworkers helped me out a bit, but for the most part I simply went through my desk. There are tons of folders and papers, documenting interns at least as long ago as 1997. Pretty interesting to go through, there is a lot of history behind this desk.

I bought a nice box of anko-mochi sweets at the shrine yesterday, and I brought it in and gave it to the office. From what I understand, employees do this kind of thing a lot in Japanese offices.

One of sempais (I'm working on everyone's names, not quite there yet. I think her nickname is Ponko? Ponda? I know it's not Ponyo.) showed me a good place to get food for lunch, a sort of conglomeration of bakeries and take-out shops across the street. At an onigiri shop, she asked which one I was going to get. Not knowing any better, I answered, and she bought it for me before I realized what was happening. I tried to pay her back (I even had exact change already in my hand), but she wasn't having any of that. I'm still getting used to this whole gift culture, it does catch me off guard sometimes. The only problem with participating in such a culture is that you need to give back appropriately or the system breaks down. If you do it wrong, you run the risk of appearing moochy, cheap, rich, or sending a message completely different than what you meant. Anyways, the rice ball was delicious.

On the way out I stopped in the bookstore at the bottom of the building. I bought the second volume of that kanji mnemonic handbook, and almost bought a Tintin book for my host sister (they had a bunch of them in hardcover, even the color Congo one, the old Soviet one, and Alph-Art, which hasn't been released afaik in the US). She's about to turn seven, which is I think the birthday I got my first Tintin book. I just haven't seen her reading a lot, so I wonder if she'd actually give it a shot. I'll probably get it for her anyways.

9/29/08
Nakatani Apartment, Nagoya

This morning I rode in on the subway to the Labo Center in Sakae. It's a waaay shorter commute than the one I had in Tokyo, glad about that.

I met my coordinator and the rest of the office, it was a rather formal introduction. My coordinator is a pretty cool dude, can't be a whole lot older than I am. After the introductions, he gave us some money and instructions to get a commuter pass, and gave me the rest of the day off.

Ms. Nakatani took me to the Atsuta Jingu, the second-biggest shrine in Japan. She bought me a health charm, a little zodiac dragon. I'm not sure if I'm really a bunny or a dragon; I grew up thinking that 1988=dragon, but some sites on the intarwebs tell me my birthday was before the Chinese new year. This not being China, both my host mom and the shrine maiden selling the charms agreed I was a dragon, at least by their terms. I'm still not convinced, but maybe I can compromise and at least be that bunny-dragon thing from monty python.

We ate lunch at a sorta western-style restaurant near the shrine. They had some gashapon machines up at the front, I bought a pokemon one while waiting for the food. I got lucky, pikachu.

It's been getting cooler and raining a lot. I hear word of another typhoon maybe coming, wonder if it'll be as devastatingly pleasant as the last one.

We were discussing my picky eating habits at dinner. My host mother has really taken to it, and has been trying this vegetarian thing out herself for the last few days (she's apparently into dieting). This is much to the chagrin of my host dad, who has been caught up as an innocent bystander in the whole thing (in Japanese households, the mom decides what's on the menu). Coming to terms with the idea that I haven't eaten any meat since I was four years old, my host dad asked, with a completely straight face, what I had eaten to get so big. As my host mother (who is a little bit more in-touch with western culture) facepalmed, he went on to ask my weight. I managed to tell him without cracking up too hard. I could see her face getting red as he got up from the table and went to fetch a reference book to translate the pound figure I had given into meaningful terms. After a little head math, he proudly announced his resulting figure to the dinner table, then did a double take and said, looking me over, "is that all?" Poor Ms. Nakatani... we got a good laugh out of it, at least.

9/28/08
Nakatani Apartment, Nagoya

I pretty much hung out with the Nakatani kids all day in the house. Watched a movie (Nemo in Japanese!), built legos and a marble structure, juggled, etc. That and did a bit of internet catching up, I actually have a connection here.

Bleah, don't feel like writing much atm. First day at the Nagoya Labo Center tomorrow, looking forward to it.

9/27/08
Nakatani Apartment, Nagoya

This morning I left Matsudo, Ms. Yokoo accompanied me to Tokyo Station. We visited a bookstore for about an hour, then had lunch at a little Italian pasta shop. She saw me onto the train and I introduced her to Katie... they seemed to hit it off pretty well, but the train wasn't gonna wait for us so we had to say goodbye. I've had to say goodbye a lot in the past couple days, goodbyes suck.

This was the first time I've ridden a Shinkansen, I was on the Nozomi line. As we went through Tokyo it just sort puttered along at normal train speed, but after we stopped at Shinyokohama and picked Coral up the train sped up a bit. It was awesome. The most apt way of describing it is to imagine being in an airplane that stays near the ground. Most of the route is pretty urban, so you're seeing houses go by at hundreds of kilometers per hour, right outside the window. It was a really surreal feeling, one that I'd had hundreds of times in my dreams, but this was the first time I felt it while fully conscious. And I was only on the medium-speed Shinkansen, I wonder what the fastest one is like.

Unfortunately that kind of speed meant that my trip was over pretty fast. My new host mother, Ms. Nakatani, was waiting for me as I stepped off the train.

When I arrived at the Nakatani home (a sizable 8th floor apartment just a block away from the train station), I was greeted by approximately eight kids, all very eager to get to know me. I'm not exactly how many there were as they were moving too fast to count, but from what I understand three of them are my host siblings, the rest being members of Ms. Nakatani's Labo party.

They ranged in age from about two to six, and had a ton of energy. They started by dumping out a big bucket of Legos. I built a six-sided color spiral cylinder out of 4x2 bricks, they liked that. I taught my 6y/o host sister, Leona, how to build the structure, she was really into it.

The mothers were all there too. I presented my album, that went over well. From what I understand, Ms. Nakatani lived in the SF Bay Area for a couple years before she lived here.

We had negi-okonomiyaki for dinner, watched 101 dalmatians, did some other stuff, but I'm really tired. I've got an elevated bed here, can't wait to test it out.

9/26/08
Ishida House, Matsudo

This is my last night with the Ishida family, they've been fantastic hosts. Tomorrow I get on the Shinkansen and zoom off to Nagoya.

Today the four of us new interns went to Kawamura-sensei's Labo parties, somewhere in western Tokyo. The first was a kindergarten party, it was a "demonstration" party with mostly non-Labo members. It went pretty well. Japanese kindergartens are awesome btw, or at least this one was.

The second party was a normal elementary school level party. It went alright for the most part, but there was a two-year-old there who decided she didn't really like me, I think it was because I took my hat off.

In any case, I'm really tired. Goodnight.

9/25/08
Ishida House, Matsudo

Today we wrote letters to ourselves, the idea being that in a year we'll open the envelopes and laugh at our naivete. My letter was fairly concise, mostly "now you're even older" stuff and asking for lotto numbers. Coral's went on for pages, I wonder what she was saying. Emma pulled out some art pens and we decorated the envelopes, too.

We had a test and speech instead of class today. I got 33 out of 41, which isn't so bad considering I didn't study for the test at all. If I can do that well on the JLPT4 in december (of which this test is supposed to be the same level) I'll pass by a good margin. I spectacularly fumbled my speech, tripping up on a word I learned two minutes before I gave it. That, and my speech was kinda dry to start with. Guess I'm not cut out to be a Japanese politician after all.

Today was likely the last time the six of us interns would be hanging out together, as the two Aussies are leaving in January. We went to the Italian place on the ground floor of the building, but only for forty-five minutes or so. Most of us had to return home to pack (we ship our suitcases tomorrow morning), including me.

9/24/08
Ishida House, Matsudo

This morning we set up our bank accounts. We don't have our ATM cards yet, but we do have these nifty little balance books. You can put them in the machine at the post office and it'll let you access your account, and it'll print the transaction in the appropriate line for you. It took me all of five minutes to jam the machine, but everything worked out ok. Eventually.

In the afternoon we went up to Amanuma-sensei's house in Saitama for a tea ceremony. It was a lot less formal than the one I did two years ago, and more enjoyable because she didn't make us sit on our legs. I got to actually try my hand at making the tea this time, also. Amanuma-sensei's husband is a record company exec, so she has a really nice house and garden. She was very eager to show it all to us, it was pretty nice.

9/23/08
Ishida House, Matsudo

Today we went up to Saitama to this traditional Japanese house/resort/restaurant and made udon. We all had our own stations and everything, it was like an udon class or something. After we made it, we got to eat it in this really nice traditional tatami room with a garden outside and everything. We even got to take some home with us.

Afterwards, we headed to Shibuya. Got to see the statue of Hachiko the dog, that was cool. Crossed the busiest intersection in the world, good heavens it was huge, lots of people. Went shopping at 109, although I pretty much just tagged along. Fashion, I think I've seen enough of that for one lifetime.

9/22/08
Ishida House, Matsudo

Tomorrow is a national holiday, but our day off got moved ahead to today. I first went to Matsudo to get my gaigokujin card, that went ok, no nasty surprises. It's nice and shiny and holographic and all that jazz, and it'll pretty much serve as my identification card for the next year.

After that, I headed off to spend the rest of the day at Akihabara. I had a few things in mind to get, none of which I ended up finding. I walked through dozens of stores over the span of about 7 hours, and did find a some cool stuff. The Haruhi and Naruto PSP games, a few really cheap PS1 games, and some gashapon figures.

Early day tomorrow, at least the trains shouldn't be too full.

9/21/08
Ishida House, Matsudo

Yuto's school sports day was today. It was supposed to be yesterday, but they postponed in because of the typhoon. I think they might have been better off leaving it as it was; it started raining intermittently an hour or so into the event, and it got worse and worse as the day progressed. The kids didn't seem to be deterred by a little wetness, though.

A Japanese sports day is pretty impressive. There are different "classes" (in this case three of them) competing in various events for points (sort of like the houses in Harry Potter). It's really more of a performance than a tournament, though. The kids had clearly been practicing for this for weeks, half the events were rehearsed dances, and there were plenty of ouendan doing performances between events. It's a pretty big deal for all the families too, everyone comes. Naota left at five in the morning to go reserve us a little patch of ground to watch from, and there were already more than thirty people there. Tomoko's parents and her brother and sister (as they were introduced to me, I think one of them she meant to say in-law) and their kids all came. One of her nephews was a cute little guy maybe a year old. He all but jumped into my arms from his dad's, didn't seem to mind one bit that I wasn't Japanese.

At about 2:00 Ms. Yokoo picked me up to go to her Labo BBQ at a park. It was fun, but we were huddled under the structure from the rain for a good portion of it. Got to eat soumen, an interesting sort of party noodle. What they do is set up a long trough (traditionally it's made from bamboo split down the middle, but we had a plastic one), and run water down it. Anyone hungry stands near the trough with a cup of soy sauce and a pair of chopsticks at the ready. Someone at the top then sends down soumen noodles (wheat noodles sort of like angel hair), tomatoes, and other goodies down the trough, and everyone goes to town with their chopsticks. There's a colander at the end to recycle missed food. It's pretty fun, and kinda competitive until everyone in front of you gets full.

The rain was sort of ambient for most of the time. After the food was done, Ms. Yokoo asked me to show my album to everyone. As this was the first time I had an audience containing younger kids, I was anxious to see how it would work. However, Zeus wasn't having any of that; the minute everyone quieted down and I started on my first page, there was a crack of thunder and the rain came down so hard that it was difficult to talk, much less hear anyone. We went through the album anyways, pretty pictures etc., but I got through it as fast as I could as it was clear that people were wanting to go home. Still, everyone stuck around to make sure everything got put away.

Fun day, but I'll still be drying off into next week.

9/20/08
Ishida House, Matsudo

The typhoon was a joke by the time it arrived, it hardly even rained. Oh well, I guess I'd rather it was too weak than too strong.

This morning I played soccer with Naota and some of the neighborhood kids.

Other than that, not a lot happened today. I spent some time fussing around with my ballot, geez there is alot of stuff on it. I wonder if it's always like this in California.

9/19/08
Ishida House, Matsudo

Today we went to the Jindaiji Temple, in Chufu. Nice place, we had lunch there too.

I went to withdraw some money from my bank account today, the one back in the US. Apparently the markets pulled some kinda Titanic last weekend, and dollar dropped by like 20% against the yen. I wish I'd made this withdrawal last week, but I should consider myself lucky that I didn't have more savings than I do in dollars. I hope everyone gets through this thing ok.

In the evening I met up with Yokoo Kouki (my old host dad) and went to his company's Seiji Touho (?) museum, the one with Van Gogh, Monet, and Gaugin. It was supposed to be a trip with all the interns, but everyone else had better things to do. The current exhibit was Giotto and some other Italian Renaissance stuff.

The typhoon is supposed to hit tomorrow. That should be fun.