That out of the way, I’ve uploaded a bunch of pictures from Gion 2009. Actually I didn’t take a lot of pictures, not nearly as many as I took 2008 [1] [2] — in fact, I didn’t even go to the big climax deal in the morning on the 17th this year — but I did take some and the camera is a lot better this time around. The pictures are available in a set on flickr, here.

More exciting is the fact my camera can make movies, and I made one of the float you see in the first couple of pictures. It’s embedded below.

That’s all for now! Excuse me as I go perish in the sultry heat.

A moment ago, I made a vid of a wasp (I think it’s a wasp) that had decided that it was a great idea to build a nest inside the door knob of my apartment. Yeah, I know it sounds crazy, but she might be one of those adrenaline junkies, what do I know…

Regardless, I made a video of when she is fidgeting around in there and put it up on youtube. I tried to get as close as possible (actually, I got as physically close as was possible), but light and such caused a bit of a pain, and focus on the filming landed on the wall in the background for the first part of the movie. Still, kind of interesting overall, so here tis:

Woosh… A year, huh. It feels exactly like I expected it to … went way too fast, did lots of stuff, but not by far all the things I wanted to do within that first year. I guess the whole economical crisis thing going on put a halter to things.

A lot of things, but I guess if I were to give Apr 5 2008-Apr 5 2009 a label, it’d be “Kanji Hell”. I spent way, way, way too much time studying kanjis. It became an obsession there at some point. Unfortunately for me, my vocab studies suffered for it, so now that I’m done with the kanjis that I had put up as a goal for myself (namely all the Jouyou kanjis), I will be focusing on vocab. Believe me when I say that I have a lot of vocabs that lay neglected.

Anyway, I’m still in Japan, unharmed but frazzled. 今年もヨロシクね！

During this time, I also got in contact for the first time with my girlfriend. I had decided at some point that the best way to learn is to simply start talking to Japanese people, so I looked around and signed up for this “find friends” web site, saying I was looking for people all over Japan who could tell me about their city. You see, I was planning on going to Japan to study, but I had no idea about where in Japan I wanted to go — I knew I did not want to go to Tokyo, but that was about it.

So shortly thereafter, I got dozens of emails from Japanese people. Or should I say, Japanese girls. The guys seem to have reservations about talking to other guys, for some reason. Even today, 3 years later, I still don’t know what’s up with that, though I have my (qualified) guesses.

Regardless, one of those dozens of people happened to be my girlfriend. We got off on a pretty rough start, to be honest. We more or less got into an argument right after the “hello”, and it kind of continued like that the nextcoming months, with us having our little bouts here and there. Despite these little bouts, the one person I continued talking to for any lengthier period of time was my girlfriend. The others peetered out into nothingness, whereas the relationship between me and her kept growing stronger. I had no feelings beyond friendship toward her at all, at that point.

She came to Sweden for the first time in April 2007, a little over a year after we first started talking (in February 2006), and spent a week touring Stockholm with me. It was during this time that we got together, and the time we could spend to dwell on our newfounded relationship in person, was fleeting. She returned to Japan and neither of us shed a tear. It was when I got back to my apartment that I really felt that something was missing, but it was fleeting. She’d only been there for a week after all.

The months that came, I made a lot of important decisions. In the end, I hadn’t really been inspired by any of the prefectures in Japan, so I decided to send out emails to a buttload of schools that seemed promising. I sent out about 40 emails and got replies ranging from:

“helo

thank u for emial !!!!!!!^.^”

(and nothing else written beyond that, no application forms, etc) to emails that looked like anything a professional native would whip up. One of the latter was from a school here in Kyoto, which I ended up choosing due to the friendliness and helpfulness of the principal.

My girlfriend and I decided that she should come spend a month in Sweden in August (2007), and so we were together for a second time. To be objective about the time is impossible, because it just wasn’t normal. We were living a sort of dream, with no problems, no responsibilities, and all the time in the world to do whatever we wanted — I was having a summer vacation at my school, and had enough money to survive without taking on a job.

At least that was how it was before her return-date came closer. In the end, we found ourselves once more doing the farewell thing, and this time as well, no shedding of tears on her sake, and none on mine. Not that we weren’t sad, mind you. It’s just that, at least in my case, if I started I know it’d just make things worse, and I think she had the same idea. Watching her back as she walked through security, I realized I wouldn’t see her for another 8 months. Presuming my plans to go to Japan actually worked out right.

I will soon have been in Japan for a whole year (April 5th, to be precise), and during this time we have both gone through a lot of things together, some good, some bad, some disastrous, but we’ve somehow managed to get through to the other side, if a bit roughed up. Each time a hardship has come our way, we’ve overcome it and grown stronger, both individually — especially I — but also as a couple. It’s a normal thing, I guess, but I marvel at it sometimes.

Last Sunday (the 1st of March), my girlfriend and I walked around Kyoto and looked at temples, ate lunch at an Italian restaurant, dinner at an exclusive restaurant in Hotel Granvia near Kyoto Station, overlooking the city lights. Afterwards before we went to her parents’ place that night, I asked her if she would marry me, and she said ‘yes.’ And no tears were shed. And the smile on her face was exactly right, somehow.

So…

Wee! I apparently passed at 1 point below 70%. Thank god this wasn’t the level 1 test since that one requires you to succeed at 70% of the questions (70% is 280, I got 279…!). Luckily this was level 2, so 60% was the requirement.

Crossing my fingers for you others who took the JLPT that same day! Let me know how it went!

During the winter vacation, we were all given a little notebook with problems for us to solve during our vacation — that’s to be expected from the school I’m attending as they’re quite strict in general. One of the problems was to “write a speech”. We’d done that in the past, but those were restricted to 1 minute only, so there wasn’t a lot of room to get elaborate or advanced or indepth. This one had no such restrictions, which resulted in me not doing the homework at all. Too much freedom confuses me.

When I got back to school after the vacation I was pleased to note that those around me, every single one, had not finished the winter vacation homework. I was not alone. Praise be $deity. The teachers, however, took this in a stride and repeatedly stated for the next following days that we should write the speech and hand that in – if only the speech. So ultimately, I sat down and started writing a speech entitled “少子化” (“Shoushika”), which translates to something like “The low childbirth ratio in some countries which is resulting in a population growing older and older, and few children”. I don’t think there’s a one-word-word for it in English, but feel free to correct me if there is. In any regard, I wrote about this, as I had some thoughts on the subject of my own (namely, briefly, “why the fuck would you want people to have children when we’re on a planet that is already overpopulated galore?” and the surrounding circumstances around why one would want that, and why one shouldn’t want that). Luckily for me, everyone else had written about their first time seeing snow, or how they loved sushi, so I ended up being picked out of my class together with one other guy, whose speech also had “content” (nothing against first-snow-experiences, but it doesn’t make for a very good speech, if you ask me).

Thenceforth, I and my fellow class-mate were now placed with the task of brushing up our speeches, with the assistance of the teachers, after which we were supposed to hold said speeches before the entire school of two-hundred something odd people, including some professor from the Kyoto University, and a few other select teachers and like-minded folks.

In short, it’s one of those occasions where your normal average Joe will get a tiny bit anxious, at the least, and spaz completely out of control, at the worst. I, on the other hand, have this bad habit of simply not feeling anything in particular about getting up in front of a crowd of several hundred people. Which was, partially, my doom this time around.

In any regard, I started tweaking my speech, but wasn’t sure what should go where, and one of the teachers at school did some heavy revising for me, which I am grateful for. It however resulted in me sitting down, finally, to try to memorize a speech which I hadn’t really written myself. Misunderstand me incorrectly though – I did write the content, and the teachers were all emphasizing that the content would be as I had imagined it, but the problem was that what I originally thought about as I sat down writing, and what came out in the end, was something else.

The name of the speech in fact changed as well, to “地球人” (“Chikyuujin” — “earthling”), and its, well, main point was that we, as people of this earth, should stop thinking of ourselves as “whatever-an/-ese/-e” (e.g. American, Japanese, Swede) and start thinking of ourselves as “earthlings”. In short order, some heavy revision had taken place, but it was still “my piece”. Well. It was two days before the speech contest, when I finally sat down to learn the speech by heart.

I had trouble. Sentences which looked similar tended to jump in at the wrong places. Sentences which ended a certain way tended to end in ways they shouldn’t. Sentences simply refused to appear in my head, at the cue of the sentence lined up before them. I tried to learn in my usual way when it comes to speeches — I start at the very bottom, work sentence-by-sentence up until the last paragraph is covered, by reading the speech from where I am and until the end. If I fail to reach the end due to not remembering etc, I wash, rinse, repeat, until it sits. I do this for every paragraph, until I’ve reached the top paragraph of the speech. At that point I start doing the same but for the paragraphs. I read the last paragraph in full. If I succeed, I start reading the last two paragraphs, then the last three, until I am basically reading the entire speech from start to finish without failing a single syllable.

Unfortunately as you might’ve guessed, this proved harder than I had anticipated. By the time it was 1 am in the morning on that day, I hadn’t gotten through the “line-by-line” deal yet. I hadn’t touched the biggest paragraph of the speech yet, and, well, the speech was in two days. I slept. Fitfully.

The next day comes around. I go to school and am requested to hold the speech in front of everyone in class, as a prep for the next day. I fail completely. I reassure myself that “tomorrow it’s everything or nothing,” and the pride I take in my ability to pull things off when I need to… is about to fuck me over.

I get home, and as I return I call my neighbor and ask him for the favor of working as audience as I struggle with the speech. He agrees, so I swing by, give him the speech, and start stumbling my way through it. It goes bad at first, then I actually pull the entire speech off, well, once, but there always seems to be some part where I stumble, or some part where I pause for several seconds to reconsider what sentence comes next. After awhile he decides that I know the speech, which I’m (wisely) a bit hesitant to agree with, but since another neighbor has her birthday this day (Thursday), we go to her place to eat cake. We eat cake, I grab a beer, then I head back to my apartment, study the speech some more, and I feel that, hum, this might work out after all. The speech seems to “be there” in its entirety — no, I know it is there, I just need to lure it out of my head, and fast enough that there are no interruptions. I slept. Unceremoniously.

Everything or nothing. There were 7 people before me holding their speeches. According to the schedule, after the 8th person — me — there would be a short break before the last half of the speeches were held. As I am about to get up, however, waiting for my cue from the announcers, they unexpectedly inform the audience that the break comes now instead. So I walk outside, stare at the sky, and think about nothing in particular for the following 10 minutes. I have this fixed idea about not practicing something “on the day”, unless I absolutely must. I never study for tests the morning of said test. Nor did I this day try to run through the speech in my head. I had confidence in my “everything or nothing” approach, because it has always worked out in my favor. Always.

It was finally my time to hold my speech. Those who’d spoken until that point had been okay — some moreso than others. Some speeches were very interesting while others were rather dull; some people had basically read from the paper, while others had stood there barely glancing down at their speech notes once. I, well, I had no speech notes. I had my speech but that wasn’t really gonna help me if I forgot. I convinced myself that the best thing I could do was to simply leave the speech in my pocket, leave my jacket on my chair, and walk up there with no aid — everything or nothing; everything or nothing.

The start went well enough. I looked at the audience, I got the words out. Then screech. Halt. Ponder. Seconds pass. I know I need to say something. My brain is absolutely blank. I pick up from some part. I start fumbling with the words. Sentences end the wrong way. I start correcting myself. Screech. Halt. Ponder. Seconds pass. I laugh and shake my head, right there, in front of everyone. I hear a teacher whisper one word and I pick it up, because it’s in my speech, to this day unsure if it was the right word at the right place, nor am I sure which teacher whispered that word, but I grabbed it and took it forward, for a while. Screech. Halt. Ponder. Seconds pass. I look down to the side at the teachers and go “Eh… nandattake?” (“Uh… what was the next part again?”) and the audience laughs.

That first pause, that first screech, that first time of so many times when my brain simply shut down, I had given up. I knew then and there that I had failed. I had chosen “everything or nothing” and for the first time in so many times where I have made that choice — taken that stance — I chose, and got nothing. Now, a few mere days later, I feel all right about what happened. I wouldn’t, if it wasn’t because that affair was such an important, vital lesson to me. I know now that I can’t pick “everything or nothing”, because I must not let myself win or fail through rolling dice and hoping to get a 6. I must win through effort and through ambition, and from my preparations for this speech, there was a sore lack of both of those.

I not only learn a language at my school.

In any case, despite my fumbling, despite my screwing my whole speech up, that keyword, “地球人” (“chikyuujin” — “earthling”), was used by almost every one of the judges in their final comments after the contest winners were elected (no, I didn’t win! big surprise there!). A teacher giggled and commented on it to me and I realized that although my speech had been an utter failure, my message had still reached someone, and so it wasn’t all for nothing after all.

I’m still considering what to do next year, since I’ll still be here. I might simply refuse to participate, or I might give it my all and try to win that contest next year, through ambition, through endeavor, through effort, rather than through the roll of a die.

I only really wanted to buy sill and maybe bread while there, but we both wanted to look at furniture, since IKEA is in Sweden too (considering it’s Swedish, that’s not surprising) and the furniture is the same regardless of the country you’re in.

I don’t go to IKEA very often, personally, but when I do go I like it a lot. I love the way they market their stuff, setting up little pretend-rooms throughout the store, and letting people sit down and check things out at their own pace. It definitely gives you a good idea just how well this and that would fit together, and testing beds is *always* fun. Bouncebounce.

The store was pretty damn big on the outside, but on the inside it was smaller than I expected. It was two floors big, and it took us just under an hour to go through the whole thing. We had sort of expected to be there for quite some time, but in the end, at 2.30 pm, we had seen everything we wanted to see, and I’d bought my food that I wanted.

Speaking of food, the “market” they have there is quite nice, but small. I found lots of Swedish food that I really wanted, among them Swedish bread (tears of joy… Japanese bread sucks…) , sill (fish in glas jars, sort of like marinated, I guess?), Swedish beer, glögg, smoked salmon, etc. And the prices were actually comparable to the Japanese stores, amazingly enough.

Anyway, since it was so early we decided to not eat dinner there, but instead decided that we should make a Swedish dinner at my girlfriend’s parents’ place to let them taste “Sweden” once and for all. So we bought more sill, more salmon, and meatballs, lingon jam, and Swedish beer. No glögg though.

It turned into sort of a christmas dinner thing, in the end. The salmon and potatoes are kind of one dish by their own, as are the meatballs and potatoes, so people sort of just picked and tried stuff from the table. Surprisingly everyone liked it a lot — even my girlfriend’s mother, who usually hates potatoes (I made mashed potatoes, which might have done the trick — the cream sauce might have done the trick too).

In any case, that was my IKEA day. It’s always great fun to cook dinner for lots of people, even though it’s not usual for guys to make food in this country. The girl’s dad always seems a little unsure how to take this all — his daughter’s boyfriend swings by and whips up food for one and all. Must not be a very common sight in Japanese households, but noone is discouraging in the slightest, so I’m gonna continue making weird dishes from my northern origin in the future. (Next up is this chicken + curry + rice thing that I love. I already have the recipe, but I’ve never actually prepared the dish myself. We’ll see how that goes…)

In a couple of months I will have been here for an entire year. I haven’t done nearly all the things I wish I’d have done by now, but I still have plenty of time left to play around with, and now that I’ve decided to take it a little easier with my studies from here on, I will have time to do the things I haven’t had time for until now.

I wish everyone a happy new year.

New Years I was originally supposed to spend by myself — or with friends, supposedly — because my girlfriends’ family said I could absolutely not attend the new years events they were planning because I wasn’t “family.” I went from “well, sucks, I would’ve liked to hang with my girlfriend on New Years,” to “ah well, I’m sure it’s an important event to the Japanese,” and then to “what the hell…!”, in chronological order.

The reason I went from “ah well” to “what the hell” was that my neighbor Kim, who has gotten a girlfriend fairly recently, was invited to her family’s New Years celebration — so with me and my girlfriend closing in on two years (or one year, if you don’t count the time before I came to Japan), what is so horribly bad about me attending? My girlfriend informed me it was a matter of to what degree the family values Japanese traditions, and I suppose that makes sense. And besides, she eventually compromised things so that she can stay here overnight on the 31st so we will be together on New Years in the end — fairy-tale ending all around.

Merry Christmas everyone, by the way. It’s actually snowing in Kyoto. Not the stick-to-the-ground kind of snow, but more the wimpy “it’s sorta white but it could just as well be rain” kind you’d expect in a place this far south. On New Years Eve (the 24th, that is), I and my girlfriend went to Kim’s apartment and hung out with 5 other people, ate Swedish christmas food (hurray for IKEA), and watched Kalle Ankas julafton (hurray for BitTorrents) on my neighbor’s computer (hurray for … Windows?), and drank glögg (hurray for IKEA).

The 25th, me and my girlfriend took it slow and went around a shopping mall, and then in the evening we went to an awesome Yakiniku restaraunt (basically a BBQ-style restaurant) near where she lives. I came home just earlier now, and woke Kim up to hear the horrific news…

Originally he was meant to go to his girlfriend’s place and stay there several nights over into the new year, with the one compromise that he sleep “with the men” in some separate place. Yesterday evening, around 11 pm, they changed their mind about this arrangement. They decided that nah, he can’t sleep there after all, because “the brother will be out and about a lot, and Kim won’t know how to operate the gas/electricity system.”

Translation: “bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit, bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit/bullshit bullshit.” So Kim’s to go there today and return back home today. Gee, that is absolutely horrendous. And so inconceivably incorrect, courtesy-wise. The reason, we think, is actually that his girlfriend has been coming to Kyoto a little too often and been staying a little too late lately, so her mother has gotten grumpy. Mothers, I tell you, scary people.

I can’t speak for others living in Japan with Japanese girl- or boyfriends, but I know that for me, the biggest shock coming here has been and most likely will continue to be, the codes of conduct regarding hospitality. The abysmal differences in how to behave properly, and how to be hospitable.

Regardless, I found myself not understanding a word they were saying — unsurprisingly; I have a hard time understanding non-conversational-but-regular Japanese, and this was nothing of the kind, spoken at a very un-regular pace. Even if I didn’t understand the words, I might appreciate the actual scenery or the performance for what it is, beyond words and meaning, but this was not the case either.

In fact, I found it difficult not to laugh. Watching this man dressed in clothes that made him look quite odd, with a woman’s mask over his head, only made me think of the fact that yes, back in the days, women were not allowed on stage, and I didn’t find it particularly admirable that they preserved this tradition (although it wouldn’t be Noh if they didn’t, and I’ll be the first to admit that).

I have no pictures, because I didn’t have a chance to borrow a camera. And besides, noone else took pictures so I suppose it was forbidden. It was pretty, but it wasn’t special.

Then there was the drum playing man who kept saying the Swedish word “Ja!” (“yes”) with a perfect accent (where’d he learn that — Swedish students should take note!), who sounded so slap-stick amusing that I had to try not to listen to him or I’d end up laughing out loud.

And the flute. Its sole purpose must have been to wake the audience up. The old man next to me (or next to his wife who was next to me) started snoring loudly at some point, and the wife nudged him a few times to wake him up. But yes, the flute. It was an ear-piercing shrieking screech. It’d wake the dead. And the drowsy audience.

I can’t blame them for being drowsy. The way Noh is sung/spoken simply lulls you to sleep. I found myself sleepy too.

The sad part is, the play was about The Tale of Genji but I still didn’t get much out of it, even though I’ve actually read the book (although in English).

It might be like Nattou. The first time I ate it I wanted to throw up, but the second time it tasted great. I’ve not given up on the Noh deal yet, but I’m quite skeptical it’ll be an art form that I’ll ever truly appreciate.