Spring is coming... soon?

Ah spring... people changing out their winter tires, the roads clear enough to bike, the school entrance ceremonies... and of course, the most ubiquitous thing Japanese people associate with spring is the sakura (cherry blossoms) blooming.  I just flew into Tokyo a couple of weeks ago and they had an announcement about "you are arriving just before the peak of sakura season, so please enjoy the beautiful sight while you are here in Japan..."  And I did get to see some sakura blooming, on the bus ride from Narita to Haneda.  But when I arrived back in Aomori, there was still some snow on the ground.  Now most of it has melted, but there's still some straggling clumps where it was really piled up all winter, and no sakura yet!  My neighborhood is famous for having lots of sakura trees (it's even in the name!) and it still looks like this:  

The sakura bloom at slightly different times all across Japan, from late March to early April in the south and central area, mid-April to late April in the Tohoku area, and even early May in Hokkaido.  Okinawa gets it the earliest, in January!  We're supposed to get them in late April and early May, and there are lots of places to view the blossoms.  Last year I went to a hanami (flower viewing) picnic at Hirosaki Castle, which has over 2500 sakura trees on its grounds!  It was really pretty and a fun festival.  I still have never seen yozakura (night-sakura, where they illuminate the trees) and it looks pretty, so I'm hoping to see that this year.  Although, I have seen sakura at night riding home on my bike, just not illuminated! 

Spring always reminds me of the song 春一番 ("haru ichiban", the first spring) that my Japanese 101 teacher tried to get our class to sing every day in the spring.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kns1DHCa0Ss  We may have been reluctant to sing in class, but hey, Patton-sensei, I still remember the song!  And right now, もうすぐ春ですね~！  

Shira-oh-no...

(Heeeey~ it's the first comic since I started using a more advanced drawing program, yaaay...  Sorry for the inconsistency between this and the past ones)

明けましておめでとうございます！  Happy new year!  \(^.^)/ 

Sorry for not posting a comic in… forever (O.O;)   I got very busy.  I did most of this one over winter break.  One of my resolutions is to draw more often, so hopefully I’ll be able to work on more comics too!  

With the end of the year comes 忘年会 (“bounenkai”) season, which means lots of fun talking and drinking with your coworkers.  Some bounenkai are more formal, and some are more casual.  In my workplace, we have one fancy, all-staff bounenkai held at a hotel downtown, with speeches, games where you can win prizes, and several courses to the meal (so much food… most of it fish, I think because people eat osechi for new years and much of that is fish).  We also have a smaller, more casual party for just my department, that is more along the lines of a regular enkai.  This year, we had it at a fancy-schmanzy sushi place, so I mentally prepared myself for lots and lots of sushi.  But I had no idea what was coming.  (O_O;) 

I don’t eat fish very often and I eat raw fish even less, so my stomach wasn’t feeling too great with course after course of various sea creatures in various states of rawness.  I thought it couldn’t get weirder than the raw sea cucumber (which was saltier than a sailor plucked straight from the sea, and also very slimy and… hard?  Slimy but crunchy.  It was a weird texture).  When I saw them bring in something tempura-fried, I thought to myself “hallelujah, something cooked!”  I saw a good ol’ mushroom on the plate, and even something green!  Yay, vegetables!!  And next to it, a few tempura-fried squiggly blobs, that I did not recognize. 

The above conversation took place with the guy sitting next to me, and after a stealthy under-the-table google search on my phone, I realized that the thing I had just put into my mouth was none other than fried fish sperm.  Yep.  Suddenly his seemingly-random choice of words made so much sense.  The word “shirako” (白子) literally means “white children”, and I would say yeah, that is a fairly accurate description of what sperm is.  Go ahead and google it, if you want to see what it looks like.  Do it, I dare you.  Apparently, I’m lucky I got it tempura fried; it looks like it’s most commonly eaten raw.

Now, I’m all for utilizing all parts of the animal (even if I don’t like actually eating them myself, I understand the appeal of not wanting to waste).  But it seems like it takes considerable effort to extract “the seminal fluid of fish” (thanks, Wikipedia), and that it would really be easier to leave certain things within the organs of the animals that produce them.  I really do not want to think about the process of obtaining that.  Guess I gotta kinkshame the fishing industry, now.

On the plus side, the evening could only go up from there!  After that, the sazae (a type of sea snail) cooked in it’s own shell wasn’t so bad (again, very salty, not to mention sitting on its own little personal pile of salt.  I could feel my sodium levels rise just from that dinner alone).

(the guy next to me probably thought I was instagraming my food)

(not today, sazae-oni!  This time I eat you!)

What an adventurous evening.  I did considerable more chatting at this enkai, reassured a coworker that do, in fact, have friends, teased my boss about liking the Green Bay Packers, informed my supervisor that the Spanish wine he brought was called 牛の血 (“sangre de toros”, Blood of the cows), ate something I once saw in a manga (the sazae, featured in Shigeru Mizuki’s “GeGeGe no Kitaro”), and learned what fried fish sperm tastes like.  I’m really not sure how to feel about that last one.  (≡ω≡;)   

Happy year of the dog, and here’s to a great 2018!  Hopefully with no more fish sperm.

Monkey See, Monkey What Do?

My mom came to visit me!  It was her first trip to Japan, and we went to a lot of places and had a nice time.  My prefecture has a lot of beautiful nature places to see, but the thing is that they're a little hard to get to via public transportation, which is why most people just get a car when they come here.  My mom got an international driver's license and valiantly braved the right-hand-side driving while I played navigator/sign-reader/person-who-tells-the-Japanese-car-navi-system-we-would-like-to-stay-on-main-roads-thank-you-very-much, so we worked as a team to get around some of the more remote parts of the prefecture.  While we were walking around the Twelve Lakes area on the hiking trails, looking at our map, there was a sudden sound up ahead like something crashing through the brush, and we looked up to find a small group of monkeys running across the path!  We could see one smallish one (maybe an adolescent?) in a tree, one crossing the path to climb up the opposite embankment, and one that just plopped itself down in the middle of the path and sat there for a while.  Neither of us knew what to do, so we just stood there and watched them for a few minutes until they wandered away, then we continued very cautiously down the path in case they came back.  It was cool because we weren't even in a designated monkey park like Arashiyama; they were just wild monkeys living their monkey lives who happened to come across a couple really tall, weird-looking sorta-monkey-creatures.  

Rated T for swearing...

I'm starting to think swear words don't translate very well...

When I was in Osaka, a friend taught me some Kansai-ben (Kansai dialect, if you've seen yakuza in movies there's a good chance they're using this dialect), and he said that なんでやねん ("nandeyanen") meant "what the fuck".  So imagine my surprise when I get up here and tell people I studied abroad in Osaka, only to have them exclaim very loudly "Oh so do you know 'what the fuck'?"  This conversation has happened multiple times with bosses, coworkers, and my teachers, and always sort of takes me by surprise.  I'm starting to think なんでやねん doesn't have the same profanity connotation as my friend said it did...

On that note, I spent years seeing words in anime get translated as "you bastard" and "shithead" and "asshole" but then when I got to Japan I noticed students (most all of them boys) calling each other the same words and no one batting an eye.  Again, maybe those words don't have the same connotation as I learned. 

Inaka Train

Coming up on the one-year mark of my time in Japan, and still going strong with no car (I made it though the winter!  Yay!)  

The thing about not having a car is that you're limited to walking/biking or taking public transportation such as buses and trains.  I've seen documentaries that gush on and on about how wonderful and frequent and always punctual to the second the trains are in Japan, and after living near Osaka for five months and Northern Japan for eleven months, I've got a sneaky suspicion those documentary-makers never went outside of Tokyo (or another major city like Osaka) for their information.  

Trains are usually pretty punctual, but I've seen them be late up here (and sometimes just... stop on the tracks for like five minutes?), and buses... man, I don't think I've taken a bus that was actually on time.  But the biggest downside of public transportation up here, especially to the more rural areas, is the infrequency of the trains/buses.  To get to two of my schools, the train that goes out there only runs nine times a day.  And good luck getting anywhere at a time other than rush hour; if I miss the 12:15, I have to wait until 2:10 for the next train.  Needless to say, I spend a lot of my school visit days sitting in train stations.  And while he knew the reason, I think my former supervisor still might not have been too happy with that, based on the detailed description the new supervisor gave me about when I should go to the schools from my house or from the office.  But, alas, when he tried to be helpful and show me which train to take, he discovered the same thing I had been saying all last year: there just aren't that many trains.  The school in this town is, I believe, the furthest north you can be and still technically be part of Aomori city, but there're farms everywhere.  The school itself is plopped in the middle of a bunch of rice paddies.  

We found the bus schedules and worked out something that amounts to a little less doing-nothing-time, but every time, as I stand waiting for the bus with little old ladies who stare at me like "what the heck is this gaijin doing this far from the city???",  I am reminded of why I dislike taking the bus in this particular fairly rural area: they are always late.  Sometimes it's five minutes, sometimes twenty.  

But when you don't have a car, what can ya do?  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯  しょうがないなぁ。     

At least the nature is pretty out there.

Koban Konundrum

(I'm experimenting with hand-writing the text, bear with me.  On the one hand, it meshes nicer.  On the other, it's more time-consuming and slightly less legible.  Not sure if I'll continue it, still deciding)

I lost my keys!  I had just gotten back to my apartment after going to the grocery store (luckily I didn't get any cold foods...) and noticed that my keys were not in my pocket.  So I rushed back to the grocery store and, like any American would think to do, asked if they had a lost and found at the service counter.  They didn't have them, though, and the woman suggested I check at the koban down the street.  For those who don't know, kobans are Japanese neighborhood police stations, sometimes translated as "police box" but they're a little different from the British ones

(Sorry, Doctor, this is not the police box you're looking for...)

Instead, they look a little more like this:


They're basically little tiny one or two story police stations set up throughout cities and neighborhoods, where police officers can keep community watch, respond to emergencies, give directions to lost tourists, etc.  I always see them everywhere, even use some of them as landmarks, yet for some reason, I forgot that someone would probably bring lost keys there if they found them lying around.

So I went to the koban near the grocery store, and then stood outside it for at least five minutes figuring out how to explain my problem in Japanese.  When I finally had a translation worked out on my phone, I walked in and basically got as far as "Excuse me, keys--" before the officer said "oh yes, we have them!" He was actually just putting the keys in an envelope to file them as I walked in.  Looks like I didn't need to spend all that time figuring out what to say after all!

To get the keys back, though, I had to show my residence card and fill out some forms.  And man, whoever turned the keys in was very thorough; they turned them in with the written description "one dark blue key holder that says UK on it holding five keys and one weather thermometer on it", and I had to write the same description three different times on the forms.  Word for word.  Eventually the police officer let me write "keys" as "カギ" instead of "鍵"  (^-^0

The officer at the koban was very nice and it was an easy process, but not one I would like to repeat any time soon.  I'll be keeping a close eye on my keys from now on.

What rule?

Being an ALT means encountering a number of... unusual ideas about English.  Some things make sense, like the idea that writing English letters has a "proper stroke order" that actually matters (after all, the stroke order for kanji does matter, so why wouldn't other writing systems be the same?)  But some "rules"... I'm not really sure where they came up with them.  One I encountered recently was the something/anything for questions, pictured above.  If you are asking a question, you generally don't know the expected answer; that's why you're asking.  So it doesn't really make sense, from an English-speaker's perspective, to phrase the question differently, in this case.  So that question really threw me for a loop.

English does have a lot of weird rules, and numerous exceptions to every rule (so many irregulars verbs... so many).  This is because English has a TON of loan words to which the origin-language's rules apply (that's why "tooth" becomes "teeth" and "goose" becomes "geese" BUT "moose" doesn't become "meese", because the first two words are German in origin but the last is Native American in origin).  And throughout history, every time someone tried to "standardize" English spelling, they employed their own method for doing so, which resulted in modern English spelling being as seemingly "random" as it is.

When it comes to English rules, it's a bit like someone wrote a bunch of things on pieces of paper, put them all in a box, shook the box, and then tossed it into the air and just grabbed one, much to the frustration of every ESL learner.