Oolong tea? More like ooh, wrong tea...

It's late March, which means there are a lot of teachers moving around to different schools (they shuffle people every couple of years, I think to avoid corruption or something).  Anyway, that means LOTS of enkais (work parties).  All-staff leaving enkai, section leaving enkai, All-staff welcoming enkai, section welcoming enkai... Lots of partying.  

Enkais generally involve a lot of alcohol.  Not just because it's fun and a chance to let loose a little bit with your coworkers, but also because it's customary for the younger teachers to circulate with bottles of beer topping off the older teachers' drinks and chatting (apparently you do this regardless of whether you are drinking or not).  But that's in the second half.  The first half is a dinner that usually involves many courses of meats in various states of uncooked-ness, from sashimi to sushi to the rarest steak I have ever seen in my life... like the middle was so rare it was still bright red (not a rare pink) and oddly squishy.  And lots of seafood.  So much seafood.  

Anyway, during the dinner, I was sitting there eating and had my glass of oolong tea (because I'm a Cool Kid™ who doesn't drink... actually I'm just lame and don't like beer.  Plus I have a hard enough time with small talk in Japanese while sober, that's a battle I don't want to attempt drunk), and I have to admit, out of all the teas out there, oolong tea is probably my least favorite.  Green tea has grown on me quite a bit, and I like black tea, but oolong... just kinda tastes like leaves.  (Yes I know that's what tea actually is.  Thank you, Zuko)

Anyway, I've got my oolong tea, and I notice that one of the sashimi and unidentified-raw-meat-that-might-have-been-horse dishes that I had in front of me had a little decorative lemon wedge on the side.  So I look around, see everyone is engaged in conversation, and then sneakily squeeze the lemon into my tea.  Whoops, the guy next to me caught me and gave me the most bemused look, so I just said something about how Americans like lemons in their tea.  Which is true; lemon wedges are a common addition to sweet tea.  But this guy looked like I had just committed blasphemy.  Which, I suppose adding something unconventional to a Japanese food is, sort of.

My other favorite moment of the night was when someone asked me if we had cucumbers in America.  Buddy, I've got news for you: cucumbers are not exactly special to Japan alone.  They're not even originally a Japanese thing, I'm pretty sure they're from Europe.

Ah yes and the man who asked me, while I was reading the event handout, "can you read any Japanese?"  Nah dude I've just been staring at this paper for three straight minutes for the hell of it.  And for some reason he was more impressed that I could read hiragana than he was when I said I could read some kanji.  (O_o)???   

On the plus side, though, I actually managed to understand a considerable amount of what was said, both in speeches and in conversations.  Not everything, but maybe half.  Improvement!

That "kanji" when your coworkers are amused by your confusion...

Someone spotted the post-it I had stuck to my desk with some kanji on it that all look very similar but mean different things.  When I see these kanji in a sentence, in context, I don’t mix them up, but when wanikani (the study website I use) throws them all at me in one unit without any sentence context, I get them mixed up.  So I wrote this, stuck it on my desk, and doodled on it when I got bored.  Much to the amusement of my coworkers, who thought this was hilarious. 

On the subject of kanji, most kanji have a number of readings (the on’yomi from Chinese, and kun’yomi from Japanese), which can make it a bit confusing to remember which ones are used in which words.  I actually thought someone’s name was San’ue-sensei for about a month until someone told me to give something to Mikami-sensei, and I replied with “Who?”  They pointed to… San’ue-sensei (or, at least, who I thought was San’ue-sensei).  And that was the day I learned that while 三 is read “san” and 上 is read “ue”, 三上 is not, in fact, read “san’ue” but “mikami”.  

This happened again when I was attempting to read a newspaper and looked at the word 下北 and thought “something-kita… ka-kita?  Kuda-kita?” and stared at it for a few minutes before looking at the conveniently-located map next to the article detailing the upper peninsula of Aomori, which is called… “Oh!  SHIMO-kita!” 

Kanji is an adventure.  (the post title is a bad example of a cross-language pun based on "that feel when..." and the fact that "kanji" also means "feeling")  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

That's not a tornado siren...

*arrives three days late with a current events comic* (I was busy this week)

Monday morning, just as I was leaving my apartment, I heard the loudspeakers posted throughout the neighborhood turn on and make an announcement.  Now, because of the echo and reverberation, plus the usage of keigo (formal language), I can’t really understand what these announcements say.  It’s mostly the echo.  I can puzzle out keigo given enough time and thought, but when I can barely hear it and it’s all echo-y… nope.  So I didn’t know what was being said, only that I had heard the same loudspeakers turn on a couple times this past summer too, in late July/ early August-ish.  And, having grown up in the Midwest, where the tornado sirens are tested the first Tuesday morning of every month, I assumed that they were just testing the emergency weather sirens, given that the sky was clear.  (Does Japan even get tornadoes??? IDK). So I finish putting on my half a dozen layers and go on my merry way to work.  

When I got to work, however, the TV was turned on to the news.  Now, we have a TV in the office, yes, but it only gets turned on in the event of national emergencies/events (and apparently prefectural parliamentary meetings, when there’s something about education, but that’s a different story).  The only other times I’ve seen them turn on the TV was for a national moment of silence for the atomic bombings on August 6th (where they showed everyone observing the moment of silence in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and then turned it off and everyone went back to work), to check the news when they heard Hachinohe lost power due to a tsunami, and to very very briefly to check the news the one time there was a slightly-noticeable earthquake, but when they saw there was no alert for it, they turned it back off again promptly.  This time, they left it on for about a half an hour to watch the news covering the test missiles North Korea fired off into the East Sea/Sea of Japan, off the coast of Akita prefecture, which happened just a couple of minutes before I recall hearing that announcement over the loudspeakers.  And then it dawned on me; those other few times I heard the loudspeakers over the summer was around the time North Korea fired other missiles too… those were not emergency weather warning drills like I thought.  WHOOPS.  Perhaps I should try to listen to them a little more carefully next time (assuming there is a next time.  Really hoping there isn’t. I hope the only thing I hear out of those loudspeakers is the daily little song they play at 5 to call children home)  

On the plus side, I was able to understand a decent amount of the news coverage, probably mostly due to the fact that Japanese news/game shows are very heavily subtitled (in Japanese, not foreign languages, but it still helps). So even if the volume is turned down or the people are talking fast or using a lot of colloquial language, the gist of the sentence is usually written prominently in standard-Japanese.

For those who don’t know, Japan doesn’t technically have a military, but they do have a Self-Defense Force (or jieitai).  There’s also an American Air Force base at Misawa, which is very close by.  That’s comforting, I suppose, but also kind of not, because there’s always the possibility that NK will target American bases in Japan and South Korea, and given that their aim isn’t terribly accurate and my city is between NK and Misawa, that’s… not particularly good.  But, I have been assured by a friend that missiles are not the same thing as nukes, and that NK doesn’t have nuclear warheads, so that’s good to know!  And my coworkers didn’t seem particularly alarmed, just a bit amazed that it was so close to us.  Lots of then were saying “woah, so close…”

Familiar Encounters, Pt. 2

I had an honest-to-gosh conversation with a crow one morning on the way to work.  

There's this 600 meter stretch of fence between the next big intersection and my office that overlooks a huge park (which is real fun to walk past when there's nothing stopping the wind from whipping across the fields and knocking me into a snowdrift).  And one day, I encountered this crow sitting on the fence about, oh, I'd say 200 meters away from my office, cawing into the open air.  So, me being the nature druid nerd I am, I cawed back, as there was no one else around to witness the weird foreigner talking to a bird.  And I swear, the crow actually jumped a little bit and stared at me with the most puzzlement I have ever seen on a bird's face before, and it let out another inquisitive caw.  I cawed back as I walked past it.  When I started to get further away, it flew and landed on a stretch of fence in front of me and cawed again, and I cawed back.  This went on until I reached the entrance of the building, where it watched me go inside as I waved and made "caw caw!" with the same inflection as you might say "bye bye!"  

(I'm not good at drawing birds... I'll get better, though.  Since I can't seem to stop talking to crows, which will lead to more stories I need to draw.)