μ（ミュー）Concert

μ（ミュー）, my friends’ singing group, alumni of chorus club from Nanjo, started singing together as their own ensemble after graduation (almost a year ago). They auditioned and made it into ハモネプ (HamoNepu), an a cappella competition on national TV in Japan, in May and November I believe. The 8 of them are college students in the Kobe area, but still perform live as well.

I sat in on one of their rehearsals at my friend Yuka’s house before their concert on December 28th. This was when the infamous boob-grabbing incident I wrote about last time happened XD

μ rehearsing:

Mayu, Kana, Nori, Yuka, Ayaka, Aki

And the best part of the afternoon (well, maybe second to boob-grabbing)… Mayu-chan deciding to redo her hair:

似合う似合う（笑）

The concert was at a really small venue, Maiden Voyage, where Yuka works on weekends. The first band was a traditional guitar-bass-drums-vocals group. The vocalist/guitarist (who is also Yuka’s bf) kept saying a bunch of really funny and adorable things like “most other bands have lyrics that are supposed to mean… uhh… something. Ours uuuhhhhh… don’t. That last song was called ‘Osaka Loop Line’ and this next one is ‘Whale’… uhh… thanks for coming.”

Then μ came on and did their thang. Sadly I didn’t get any good pics of the concert (my camera kinda sucks at darkness.) But there are some on the μ blog and they also have a website in case you just happen to be stopping by like me.

Here they were performing at HamoNepu in November:

Boobs

I hereby promise not to make a habit of telling stories about my body on my blog. But this one just needs to be told.

One of the reasons I came to Japan in such a rush was to make it to the concert of the group μ(ミュー）or I guess “myu” in English. They’re a singing group made up of 8 girls from the chorus club from my high school, including Noriko (my host sister) and Yuka (the friend who I’m staying with). More about μ and their concert later.

The 6 μ members who would be in the concert that night came over to Yuka’s house in the afternoon to practice. First three of the girls (Noriko, Mayu, and perhaps Kana) showed up. We were sitting at Yuka’s kitchen table, and squealing hisashiburi (long time no see) over and over.

Things quieted down for a bit, and then Mayu-chan, who was sitting next to me, blurted out, “Your boobs got so big!!” and before I could respond, she reached over and started touching my left breast.

“Umm, I guess so…” I responded, not really acknowledging the groping that was going on.

But Mayu-chan suddenly noticed what she was doing, and suddenly started apologizing, “Oh, sorry, I shouldn’t touch them!! That’s rude!!” as if someone had once long ago told her you shouldn’t touch other people’s boobs without their consent, and she had just now remembered that rule.

I told her it was cool and things ended there. Or so it would seem.

The rest of the band showed up (Akino and Ayaka) and rehearsal began. After they rehearsed, everyone was chilling out on the couch, taking pictures, touching up their makeup, snacking, etc. At this point, Akino was sitting arm’s reach away in front of me on the other couch. She took a look at me, and suddenly shouted “Your boobs are huge!!” sounding way too happy about this. Then she reached out and touched them with both hands.

But unlike Mayu-chan, Aki did not stop.

“Whoa, they’re so soft (ふわふわ）!! Feel these, you guys! This is crazy!” (Squeeze squeeze) “No, seriously, have you felt them?!”

To which of course, everyone was like, “Mayu-chan already did.”

“WHAAAAAT!? Really?!”

“It was before you got here, Aki.”

The touching & squeezing lasted a good 30 seconds. Unlike Mayu-chan, Aki never appeared the least bit ashamed or awkward about feeling me up.

So Japan, what’s up with the girl-on-girl boob grabbing?? This must be within some realm of normal here (since something similar happened to another girl on our school trip to Okinawa in 2006), but does anyone else find it surprising that in a culture where there’s so little affectionate touching (hugging, kissing, etc.) that boob grabbing is pretty chill?

Also, to all you other gaijin ladies out there, do you have similar boob-grabbing stories? Please share.

A 27-hour Journey to Japan

I am in JAPAN. Right now. Surprised? So am I, sorta. Mostly because of the timeline of planning this trip:

Plane ticket for Saturday – purchased on Wednesday
Train ticket for Saturday at 6:10 am – purchased on Saturday at 5:30 am

Yeah, ギリギリ (leaving things until the last minute) is how I roll, apparently.

One troublesome thing about traveling to Japan:
Getting here (here being my friend Yuka’s house) took 27 hours, but really, it took the entire weekend, because with the time difference, I left my home at 5:45 am on Saturday morning, and arrived here around midnight on Sunday night. Whew. But with a few hours to the airport, 2 hours of delay while sitting in the plane (waiting for connecting passengers, de-icing the plane, and otherwise chillin’), 12 hours of flying (6+ of which were spent asleep! I won’t be a 時差惚け！) in business class, which is freaking amazing, an hour or so of customs and finding my bag, picking up my rental phone, changing some $$ into 円, and buying an adapter so I can actually charge my laptop here… I decided it was time to find out where I was going.

For my first week in Japan, I’ll be staying with my friend Yuka. I contacted her about a week ago on the off-chance her family would be nice enough to let me stay here, but realized that her email address had changed and the only way I could contact her was via mixi-message (Mixi is sort of the Japanese equivalent of Facebook.) So I’d told her when I was coming, my flights, etc., but we hadn’t quite gotten around to exchanging email addresses and phone numbers. So right before I left America I sent a mixi message asking Yuka for her contact info. I was pretty certain she’d have time to respond before I got there.

So I picked up my rental phone, stood in the station, figuring out how to use the damn thing, found the web browser, logged into mixi, was delighted to see there was in fact a message from Yuka, opened it, realized there’s no way to copy/paste from a website (or at least I couldn’t figure out how to do it), got out a piece of paper, and wrote down phone numbers and email addresses.

I found some appropriate train and shinkansen (bullet train) tickets and headed towards Tokyo, and wrote Yuka an email on the way. Contact stablished!

At Tokyo station I looked around for some food to eat. None of the typical bento looked particularly more appealing than any of the other typical bento, so I was unimpressed. Instead, I found a girl giving out free samples of Earl Grey flavored bagels, which was one of the most amazing tasting things I’ve ever had, and decided I needed more of whatever they were selling. I gazed longingly at various green-tea flavored pastries and settled on this green-tea-white-chocolate muffin. It was one of the most delicious things I have eaten in a long time. Look at that green, moist fluffiness…

After paying, I made a run for it and actually made the bullet train in time, with at least 1 minute to spare (doing great!) I changed trains at Shin-Osaka and started heading toward Yuka’s house.

Or so I thought.

I made a critical mistake, which was that after stop #2 or so, I completely stopped paying attention. This means that when we got to Amagasaki, I should have changed trains. But I just sat there, because, again, I wasn’t really paying attention. I played with my cell phone, I people-watched a group of guys across from me on the train (who were talking about me briefly, and I got to hear the inaugural “gaijin” said about me). Anyway, after a couple more stops I was thinking “this is a strange train station name that I’ve never heard…” and after one more, I was in Itami. ITAMI!??! I know where Itami is, and that’s NOT where I’m going. Okay, time to turn around. I got back to Amagasaki and made sure to take the correct train. Suddenly the station names were extremely familiar and comforting. I emailed Yuka to explain why I was late (whoops). It should not have taken over an hour of riding local trains, but it did.

Finally I made it to Yuka’s. Her dad predicted exactly where I had gone wrong on the train AND at what station I had realized my mistake. Yuka gave me some soup and kurumi-pan and chocolate, and we hung out for a while. Walking into her house was a bit weird, since I came here once, at the very end of my stay in Japan. So it’s been 2.5 years, but actually being in her house, it feels like no time has passed at all…

So I’ve only come to Japan from outside the country twice before this. Once in 2005 (my first visit) and once in 2006 (the beginning of my study-abroad year). Each time I arrived, everything would always seem extremely weird, bizarre, foreign, cute, polite, stylish, small, etc. I was always hit in the face with the pure Japanese-ness of it all in a very jarring, Lost-in-Translation kind of way.

The weird thing with this trip is that everything seems totally normal. Yup, there’s suddenly a lot of Japanese people, stores selling Japanese things that I love, ads featuring celebrities that I fangirl, those train station sounds, riding on one side of the elevator, every professional person in a cute and very ironed-looking uniform, kanji freaking everywhere… I’m still thinking oh-my-god-I’m-in-Japan but I’m not reacting to things in that fresh-gaijin EVERYTHING IS CRAZY HERE kind of way.

Is culture shock like riding a bike?

Or maybe it’s just that this time, instead of everything being weird and overwhelming, it just feels like home.

But in the first almost-24 hours of being here… there have been a number of things that I hadn’t actually forgotten about existing, but I sort of forgot to expect, and were pleasant surprises:

- Heated toilet seats. I am back in “it’s winter so your toilet should be cold” mode from America. What a freaking pleasant surprise the first time I went to the bathroom here.

- Exactly how pleasant Japanese baths are. Yeah I miss ofuro on a daily basis, but after primarily taking showers for most of college, the whole ofuro routine is SO NICE. Especially after traveling for 27 hours, soaking in 42°C water late at night in the winter… so completely wonderful.

- amado (storm shutters) – they’re on the outside of the windows in the room I’m staying in. They just make the room pitch-dark even when it’s midday. I used to actually not like amado when I lived here (one of my host families always closed them) because it threw off my sleep cycle to have it be dark like 4-am in my room at 10 am, but again, after the whole 27-hour journey thing, the ability to sleep soundly until 10 in complete darkness is very appreciated.

For now, I’ll indulge in a little bit of tv before Yuka brings back μ (her singing group) to practice here and I reunite with 5 other people I haven’t seen in 2.5 years. I’m going to their concert tonight, and it should be FAB.

Jya ne.

1 Litre of Tears: Heartwarming, Tearjerking,
but Somehow Still Fun

You need to cry. This is so sad. Cry now, dammit. Are you seriously that heartless a bastard? If you don’t cry during this episode, *I’m* going to cry. This music cue should make you cry. I see those tears welling up. No? Please cry? Pretty please? With cherries on top? I’ll be your best friend if you cry… I’ll give you a foot massage…? Fine, be that way.

I felt like the drama 1 Litre of Tears was taunting me as such, every time I watched an episode.

But this show has reason to make you cry: based on the 1986 book by Aya Kito, 1 Litre of Tears tells the story of a 15-year old girl, Aya, diagnosed with 脊髄小脳変性症 (sekizui shounou henseishou, or Spinocerebellar ataxia), a neurological disease that leaves her mind intact but gradually robs her body of the physical ability to walk, talk, and eat by herself. The show focuses on Aya’s family and close friends, and how the disease affects their lives. Aya writes a diary for the entire duration of her illness, which helps her come to terms with the illness and reach out to her friends, family, and eventually a following of readers when her diary is published.

By the time we meet Aya (played by Sawajiri Erika) and her adorable, wholesome family, her body is already acting up a bit. She drops things too much, she falls on her face, she spaces out during basketball games and loses her depth perception. Aya is supposed to be a typical 1st year high school student with good grades, two BFFs, and a senpai-love interest. She helps out in her dad’s tofu shop, makes peace between her rebellious younger sister, Ako, and the parents, and helps look after her younger two siblings. Mom starts noticing Aya’s acting funny, takes her to the doctor (Fujiki Naohito) and finds out what’s wrong before anyone else has begun to catch onto the fact that Aya isn’t just a klutz.

And then there’s Asou-kun. Played by Nishikido Ryo, this boy is the son of a doctor at the local hospital, and, to his father’s dismay, Asou-kun has no aspirations of becoming a doctor himself. Traumatized by his older brother’s death, Asou-kun spends his time in bio club tending to the turtles, avoiding human relationships. People all die anyway, he says, and he doesn’t care. However, he seems to keep ending up in the right place at the right time to help Aya out, and gradually a bond forms between them. He helps her up when she falls, knocking over a whole rack of bicycles. He runs to get her in the rain after she’s stood up for a date by a guy (basketball-senpai) who can’t handle the whole “girl in the hospital” thing. Eventually, Asou-kun’s attachment to Aya helps him overcome the death of his brother. His dad, however, is vehemently opposed to their romance as he doesn’t want his son to get attached, as it will inevitably lead to pain — Asou-kun’s dad goes as far as blatantly telling Aya’s mom that he doesn’t want his son anywhere near her daughter. Of course, Asou-kun’s relationship with Aya does finally inspire him to study medicine like dad always wanted.

Asou-kun, telling Aya how he has a deadly disease. Not long to live. HA JUST KIDDING. What an ass. Good use of foreshadowing though, 1-Litre.

What I like about the pace of this show is that once Aya gets sick, her condition doesn’t deteriorate very quickly. They choose not to focus on watching her get very sick, and instead to center the show around the psychological impact of the disease.

Here were a couple of things that kept creeping up on you throughout 1-Litre (some people would call these “themes” I suppose):

You can’t actually keep this disease under wraps.
The number of characters who had to “figure out” what was wrong with Aya was kind of astounding. Aside from her neurologist (who should really be the only one who has to diagnose her), Aya herself isn’t told about the disease for weeks. Why does she have to take these strange pills every day, she wonders. She bets it’s not just for her dizziness. Mom also keeps the news from Dad, Aya doesn’t tell anyone at school, no one ever tells Asou-kun (but luckily he has a full library of medical books at home so he can figure out exactly what’s going on by himself). Possibly worst of all, Aya and her parents don’t tell her other siblings for an extremely long time, leaving Ako especially feeling even more hurt, annoyed, and untrusted in her family than usual. Pretty bad dynamics going on with all this secrecy.

The illness is not Aya’s fault. Or her mom’s fault.
This kind of should go without saying, but the show spent an incredible amount of time, effort, and metaphor showing us that no one in Aya’s family is responsible for her illness. She was an otherwise healthy girl, Mom always put plenty of effort into her daughter’s health and nutrition, etc etc. However, there was this subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) implication coming from everyone in the community that the disease was Mom’s fault, or at the very least, Aya was getting worse because Mom was holding a job, instead of being a housewife and looking after her children full-time (side note: the two-parent income in this family seemed to be mostly possible because Aya’s dad ran the tofu shop out of their home, and generally was far more involved in his kid’s lives than the average household.) 1 Litre of Tears certainly tried to emphasize that Aya was not, in fact, sick because Mom works.

Meiwaku is kinda bullshit.
Once Aya gets sick, she has to rely on others a lot more than she is used to – causing them a lot of meiwaku (basically “trouble” or “inconvenience”). Her friends help her walk to class, her parents drive her up to the school building (which virtually never happens at Japanese high schools), she has to borrow her friend’s notes, etc. etc. She starts to see her life as a big inconvenience to other people, and constantly keeps saying that she doesn’t want to trouble them (meiwaku kakechau to omou kedo…) but can’t get by without help with this and that. Aya suffers some massive guilt, and criticism from the community (especially the PTA at school) that she is just causing a lot of meiwaku and the school shouldn’t be expected to deal with it. Mom begs the other parents to give Aya a break for a little while longer, because she loves her school, but soon even the kids turn on Aya as well in a classroom-wide bitchfest behind Aya’s back, led by a girl who is jealous of Aya’s relationship with Asou-kun. She interrogates Aya’s two bffs, one who has undying loyalty to Aya, but the second cracks under the pressure, saying that she does things for Aya because they’re friends, but sometimes it’s so stressful, and… while everyone else (including the teacher) sits with downward-cast eyes, Asou-kun hits the desk, stands up, and tells them to stop being such hypocrites. If you’re so bothered by Aya’s condition, stop going out of your way to help her. If she’s just meiwaku like you say behind her back, don’t go on pretending and telling her it’s okay day after day. You people make Asou-kun sick.

It was an epic speech. Bravo.

Asou-kun and Aya

All the actors did a fab job, and most of them are incredibly famous today (the parents, the kids, the doctor, etc.) Nishikido Ryo is a smashing success doing the jdrama/popstar thing, and then there’s always Sawajiri Erika (Aya), who went onto play another sick girl in Taiyo no Uta, and, in later years, became the center of the infamous “betsu-ni” PR incident (Japanese girl celebs looking pissed and “whatever”-ing the interviewers don’t go over so well!)

Overall, I’m not sure this drama deserves quite the credit it is always given. It was touching, it was sad, it was fun, it always made me want to watch another episode, but it’s not one of the top 5 shows I have seen. What gives? It’s near the top of almost all drama lists I’ve seen. Hmm. Perhaps it’s the fact that it’s a true story? Or perhaps the fans are just especially vocal? To those of you who enjoyed this drama over almost all others, what made it so moving for you?

Oh yeah, and about the crying…
In the end, it wasn’t the disease, it wasn’t the wonderfully portrayed tragic family that got me. It was a badly-scrawled love letter, breaking Asou-kun’s well-protected-yet-unmistakably-soft heart. A litre of tears all around!

JLPT Level 1 (without studying!) Impressions

Or, why everyone needs to chill out about this test.

Last Sunday, December 6th, some 200,000 non-native Japanese speakers took the JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test) to show off their Japanese skillz, hoping to impress potential employers, schools, or just for their own personal amusement. This year, I took Level 1 (the hardest of the 4 levels offered). The Japan Foundation, who runs the JLPT in the US, claims Level 1 tests whether:

The examinee has mastered grammar to a high level, knows around 2,000 kanji and 10,000 words, and has an integrated command of the language sufficient for life in Japanese society.

Okay, so this is a hard test, we get it. It’s offered once a year, on the first Sunday in December. It’s a several hour drive away from me (not really something to count on in December), costs 50 bucks, and consists of 4 hours of intense SAT-style Japanese multiple choice questions. All of these things can add up to a fair amount of pressure to NOT MESS IT UP.

Which is why I decided to take the complete opposite approach: I aimed to fail. I did not study for the JLPT at ALL.

My strategy was basically this: Since I’ve heard the JLPT is pretty hard, I am probably going to fail anyway. But, I have no idea how close to passing I actually will be, so why not use this year as a baseline and study my weaknesses next year? This approach makes sense for a couple of reasons:

1) I’m a busy college student, not taking any Japanese classes. I don’t have extra time to devote to studying (unless I sacrifice eating, sleeping, or having friends), so I will likely do a half-assed job studying anyway. If I felt pressure to study properly, I probably would just give up and not take it, which leaves me with less experience.

2) Taking exams can be pretty stressful for me. I’m kind of a test-taking perfectionist, so spending extra brain cycles worrying about whether I was studying enough, whether I’d pass, what would be on the test, etc. is detrimental to my learning and overal mental health. Which brings us to:

3) I don’t actually need to pass the JLPT this year. I’m not using it for any immediate employment/studying options — thus, I have time to NOT pass the test. I’m considering doing IUC or something similar in the future, but even those programs don’t require you to already have passed JLPT 1. So for now, I’m sort of in the “taking this for my own personal amusement” category.

4) I’m curious how much of my Japanese usage in my daily life improves or at least maintains my abilities. I have taken a few semesters of Japanese here in college, but since May the only Japanese I encounter is in the form of watching lots of jdrama, translating manga, and talking to people on Twitter.

Past JLPT Experiences
I never took JLPT 4 (I planned to, junior year of high school, but got sick and couldn’t go that day). JLPT 3 I took senior year, and did a bit of studying for about a month beforehand. I had been to Japan once for a 2.5 week trip at this point, and studied Japanese throughout high school. It went fine. I passed. Hooray.

A year later, in December 2006, I took JLPT 2. At this point I had been living in Kobe, Japan for just over 3 months, and going to high school there. You’d think I’d get a lot of natural practice, living in Japan and all, but I felt extremely insecure about my ability to pass this test and ended up studying a LOT. In school, I had an amazing tutor, Nagai-sensei, who helped me especially with the grammar. I learned 10 new kanji every day and practiced writing them over and over. I bought like 6 books of the past exams and went over them multiple times. I didn’t use any fancy software, but I did a lot of daily self-studying and I learned a lot doing it. Unfortunately, I had all this free time mainly because I was not happy with my host family and having generally a very poor experience at the time. I didn’t have any friends at school yet, my house was a little out-of-the-way from places one would go exploring, and so I spent many lonely weekends in my room practicing kanji. (Maybe this is why I have a negative association with studying for the JLPT XD) When I took the exam, I felt horrible about it, and thought there was no way I passed. Here were my thoughts about it at the time. However, the hard work apparently paid off and in February I found out I had passed level 2!!

This year: JLPT 1
The week leading up to the JLPT involved a grueling amount of not-studying. Instead, I was busy participating in a Japanese Fashion Show at school (wearing my adorable pink yukata, of course). Saturday night I hit up about four parties, including the fashion show afterparty, in rapid succession and still got to bed by about 1 am. In the morning, I started making my way towards the test, helpfully transported by Dave. We arrived early and I had time to spot the Aldo store a couple of blocks from the test and scope out a somewhat gratuitous pair of black leather ankle boots that sent me on a great post-shopping endorphin rush.

I don’t think I’ve ever been less stressed out before a test.

When I arrived at the testing room, it felt vaguely familiar (since I’d been there 4 years ago). There were very few people in the room and the proctors were worried not enough would show up to start the exam (if 30% of people are missing, apparently they are supposed to delay the test). However, we reached some critical mass, listened to instructions, and had about 8 minutes of awkward waiting-for-the-test-to-start time. Our proctor was this really genki, amusing Japanese guy who tried to make small-talk with the room at-large instead of letting us wait in painful silence. He asked who had worked in Japan before, who was still a student, who was taking level 1 for the first time, etc. Then he moved onto asking when we started studying Japanese. The majority started in college. When he asked who had started studying in high school, only about 3 or 4 people (myself included) raised their hands. For some reason, Mr. Proctor looked right at me and said, “Hmm… you seem like you would have…” [been studying Japanese since high school]. Everyone laughed, including me. What is that supposed to mean?! However, I couldn’t get an answer out of him, as he had already began questioning the girl who has been studying Japanese since elementary school. わからないな。

Anyway, onto the actual test!

Writing-vocabulary: Basically, a lot of kanji. I expected to randomly guess on everything, but surprisingly, I legit knew about 30% of the kanji, some of which I’ve known and been using for years. Hmm, not so difficult. The sections where you had to find homophones and homonyms to a given word were more difficult. Which of the following kanji has the same reading as the given kanji? You have to know at least 2 kanji and be pretty secure on the readings. Kinda tough.

Listening: Surprisingly easy. This is definitely the part I struggled with the most on JLPT 2 and 3 (I tend to be more of a visual reading/writing oriented person than a verbal one), but I caught most of what they were saying on all the questions here. A few tricky ones here and there, but I’d say there is a good chance I passed this section. One possible explanation is that while I didn’t actually study, I have watched over 14 jdramas so far this year, which is close to 168 hours, the same as a week straight of jdramas all day every day (or a full month of watching jdramas as if it were my full-time job, 8 hrs a day… if only…) Anyway, I have clearly spent a reasonable amount of time listening to Japanese. Did it help? Probably. Oh, and one other thing about the listening section… the last question on the listening section was a LITTLE ridiculous. Mhm.

Reading/Grammar: Ugh. An hour and a half of OUCH. Honestly, it was not incredibly difficult, there were just a lot of passages to read, some of them far too long. It was mentally exhausting, and by the end of the 1.5 hour period allotted for this section, I was still completely racing for the finish. Note for next time: pump up reading speed.

Aaand the test was finally over. As usual for 4:40 PM in December, it was pitch black outside, so I headed out, feeling like the day was gone, before getting a chance to see a couple of friends I hadn’t seen in a while and returned home, feeling not as exhausted as standardized tests normally make me. I came to the realization that a not-so-small part of me actually ENJOYED taking the test. Yeah, I know enjoying the JLPT is kind of a sick thought. But, it’s Japanese after all, guys. It’s fun.

Did I pass? I don’t think so. But besides my twisted sense of enjoyment from the whole thing, there are some other up-sides:
• I now know what JLPT 1 is like, and am no longer scared of it. TOO MUCH HYPE, GUYS.
• When I get my scores back I’ll know which areas to focus studying on for next time (possibly next year)
• Those shoes I bought before taking the exam are freaking excellent, and there is no Aldo store in my town. So if it weren’t for the JLPT, I would’ve missed out on these, which is not really an option XD