Niigata A-Go-Go

Here are some shots of Shibata's more rural side, along with the first couple pictures I took in Niigata City, which is the largest (and capital) city of my prefecture. There are many more pictures coming soon!

Where I Work

Here's a shot of a little bronze owl; every Japanese town has one. Next there's a picture of the view from my little classroom and then the classroom itself, complete with mysterious purple glow (every Japanese town has one).

Back in J-land

Hello "everyone," I'm back in Japan! This time as an English teacher...it's an experience.

Anyway, here are some photos I took with my new iPhone 4 (!) of my town, Shibata, including the castle near its center. Thanks to this castle, Shibata is one confusing mess of streets; way back in the day the maze-like roads were designed to confound enemy invaders--now it's just for confounding poor innocent English teachers. The first picture shows where I work now.

Japanese Music

Anyone who knows me well knows that most of my music listening revolves around classic rock from the 60's and 70's...mostly from British bands like The Beatles, The Who, and Pink Floyd. That certainly hasn't changed with time, but I feel since this is a Japan-themed blog, I should take a little time to introduce some music from Japan that I enjoy.


The Yoshida Brothers: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RERXiliJfdI.

These guys specialize mostly in instrumental music involving traditional Japanese instruments called shamisen, which is kinda like a 3-stringed guitar with its own distinct sound. Both of the Yoshida Brothers are very skilled at playing shamisen and like to mix their playing with other styles of music, including rock. As far as I know they are quite popular in Japan, as well they should be.

The Pillows: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYGNM_gJrV4

J-rock at its finest. These guys know how to rock, and not just by being loud. I liked The Pillows way before I started learning Japanese thanks to a 6-episode Japanese animated series called Fooly Cooly, which featured The Pillows' music exclusively as its soundtrack. The sad thing is, almost every Japanese person who I have talked to about music seems to know nothing about these guys! Such a pity, but I'm sure the band is getting along just fine all the same.

Puffy AmiYumi: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1KbwPnZn24

Okay, so maybe this is considered pop music...but I feel like these girls have really got a good thing going on. Unlike most Japanese pop music that I have heard, which mostly involves singing in cutesy voices and features catchy choruses (not unlike pop music in the states), Puffy's music has soul and is about the music itself. Sure Puffy have a lot of catchy songs, but much of their work feels like more than just saccharine pop melodies, and sometimes they manage to sound more like a rock band than anything else.

I think that'll do it for now. There's certainly more Japanese music out there that I enjoy, but I tire of typing it all out! Ciao.

Kanji

In Japanese, there are four "alphabets," for lack of a better word. There are two sets of syllabries called hiragana and katana, which have about 47 characters each, representing sounds like "a, ka, sa, shi, ne". There is also romaji, and then there is kanji.

Hiragana is mostly used for native Japanese words and some names, while katakana is usually reserved for foreign loan words (but not always). Here's an example, my name:

えりっく

エリック

The top is hiragana and the bottom is katakana, which is how my name is normally spelled, since it is of foreign origin. They both have the exact same pronunciation: erikku. When words are spelled using the english alphabet like that, it is called romaji. Pretty much every Japanese person learns the English ("roman") alphabet and romaji is used all over Japan.

Finally we have kanji, which are basically Chinese characters that have been imported and incorporated into the Japanese language across many centuries. Kanji are used for Japanese names, for placenames, for many nouns and verbs...for just about everything. This is the hard stuff...because in order to read something basic like a Japanese newspaper, you need to know roughly 2,000 characters. Kanji is the stuff that makes Japanese learners cry and curse their brains. I am supposed to know somewhere around 1,000 kanji at my level, though the number I can actually remember how to write is far below that (reading is easier than writing; you can recognize many characters even if you cannot recall them perfectly for writing). I have recently begun attempting to learn all 2,000+ general kanji from scratch in order to gain true literacy. I certainly find myself with the time to do it.

Kanji looks like this: 期末試験.

Kanji are difficult to learn not just because there are many characters, but also because most of the time each character has mutiple ways in which it can be pronounced. For this reason I consider Japanese to be the hardest written language in the world (though admittedly I cannot speak for all other languages, not having attemped to learn them).

Back from the Dead but not in Japan

Hello everyone! (that is to say...no one, seeing as it's been so long)

I sincerely apologize for abandoning this blog while I was still in Japan last year; I was either too busy or too lazy to continue updating it, even though I did a lot of things that were definitely blog-worthy. Oh well, anyway...I've decided to once again resurrect this blog because there's a chance I will travel back to Japan next year as an English teacher or maybe if I'm lucky a city government clerk, or something like that (JET program). Anyway, I've heard the process of applying is rather painstaking, so I've already started to gather up some necessary documents like transcripts just in case I really choose to take the plunge.

In the meantime, seeing as my job search here in Washington state is repeatedly running me into brick walls, I've decided to start devoting more time to studying Japanese again, specifically kanji--the Chinese symbols which number in the thousands and are undoubtedly the greatest obstacle facing anyone who wants to become literate in Japanese. I'll write more on this later!

Hakone

On the 18th, Sakura and I went on a two-day trip to Hakone, a famous sight-seeing area located about an hour and a half away from Tokyo by train. Hakone is mostly famous for being a hot spot for onsen (hot springs - pun probably intended), but there's a lot more to do then sit in extremely hot slightly sulfurous water all day.










The first picture is just the first picture taken when we got off the train. Hakone is located in and around mountains, so if you look in any direction you're probably going to see one. It was a nice change of scenery. The second picture was taken from the "Hakone Ropeway," a pretty neat form of transportation. The next picture is the Ryokan (traditional Japanese inn) where we stayed. It was quite nice though not dissimilar from the previous Ryokan I stayed at last year. You are supposed to be able to see Mt. Fuji from Lake Ashinoko, but as you can see in the last picture it was a bit too cloudy on the second day of our visit.