Frogs are everywhere in Sasayama! When walking home in the dark I’m afraid I’m going to crush them. Here’s a few photos of them sitting on vending machines, where they can eat the bugs attracted to the light. Photos taken with my camera phone.
I’ve decided I could also use this blog as a way to track my progress in learning Japanese. I studied Japanese for one year in Uni. However, I failed my second semester. I did pretty good in the written test, but I flunked my oral. Because of that, I was unable to continue with the second year of the course.
When I reached Japan, one of the first things I did was find a Japanese teacher. And it just so happened she uses the same text book I used in Uni. I went back, almost all the way to the start, because during my year gap, I’d forgotten almost everything I’d learnt. I think my Japanese is better than when I was in Australia – even if I’m not as far in the book. I did an activity. I remember doing it in Uni and struggling through it, but I didn’t have to look up a single word time time around. Anyway, occasionally I learn a word or phrase or Kanji outside my textbook, and sometimes there’s a story to it. A few days ago, I bought this:
Japan has a lot of weird sandwiches in bags. They also have creme caramel, for example. I’d never seen this one for sale before. I could read the first kanji 小 – which means small, and all the katakana ミルククリーム which means ‘milk cream’. The picture shows beans, but I don’t know what kind. Anyway, the sandwich was full of mushy white paste with red flecks in it. But I had still no clue what I was eating.
So when I reached work, I looked it up in my Kanji book.
Mame. It means ‘bean’. I realised I’d known the word for ‘bean’ for a while, but it never clicked. One of my favourite new foods in Japan is edamame, which is baby soy beans. But that still doesn’t answer what I just ate. Small beans? When I got home, I was able to look up the kanji compound.
小豆 means azuki beans. It is used in many Asian deserts, such as anpan. 大豆 literally translates to ‘big bean’ and means soy bean.
The way my company works, most teachers work at four schools. For three weeks out of a month, the students are taught by a Japanese teacher who can teach grammar and vocabulary in their own language. Once a month, they get a native English speaker like me to help with pronunciation. Because each teacher works at four schools, some of them could be quite far away from home. This week I’m working at Sasayama school, which including the walk to Fukuchiyama station, is a 2 hour and 2200 yen trek. Here’s some of the sights you’ll see along the way.
This is Fukuchiyama station. I’ve heard that Fukuchiyama is trying to position 
itself as a trading hub. It defiantly has the location to do it – being not too far from Osaka, Kyoto and Kobe. I’ve heard the city has spent a lot of money to improve the station for this reason. And it shows. When I arrived to the city, the front of the station was under construction. It looks really good now! To the right is what it looks like inside. Nice and clean! There’s a few shops in the station. A Mister Donut, a convenience store, a newsagent, a cafe and a couple of noodle places.
This is a train. Fukuchiyama is the first stop so it’s already waiting for me when I arrive. The train trip between the two cities is around one hour. Another one of my schools is on the same line, at a station called Isou station. This school is only a thirty minute train trip though.
For the most part, there’s nothing but rice paddies and forest on either side of the train for the entire trip. As you approach each station, small build-ups of houses appear.
Mamonaku Tanba Ooyama. Tanba Ooyama desu.
Anyway, I’m still not at work. Next I have to catch a bus! Bus trip is around 20 minutes. Busses work a little differently in Japan. You get on using the back door. As you enter, there’s a little ticket dispenser. You pull a ticket out and it has a number on it. At the front of the train there’s a board with numbers. I’ll put the rest of the photos on the photo page. For example, when returning from work I pull a ticket with the number 2. The price under the number 2 on the board tells me how much I’ll pay if I get off at the next station. As the train goes further, the price increases. Also the ticket dispenser starts providing tickets with different numbers. So if you get on several stops after me, you’ll get a ticket with a number 3 on it, and you’ll pay less because you haven’t travelled as far. When you get off the bus, you use the front doors, and you drop the ticket and your coins into a slot at the front of the bus.
The train drops me off right outside a temple. Also this is what the street looks like.
You turn the corner and it turns to rice paddies.
Ten minutes of walking through the price paddies and I finally reach the classroom. Sasayama classroom is such a hassle to get to, but it’s one of my favourite schools. I’ll put all the photos on the photo page.
I decided to finally take a few shots of my apartment. As you would guess, it’s smaller than your average western apartment. Here’s a few pictures, but you can find them all in the photos section.
I guess I’ve kinda ignored this blog. It’s mostly because I haven’t done anything I’ve found interesting enough to share here. I went to Himeji last month to go to the castle. However the castle is is going to start being repaired at the end of March, so the day I went was one of the very last days to see it. When I arrived the place was flooded with people. I got into the line for the ticket booth, only to find out the line itself was 80 minutes long, so I left and went shopping instead. Himeji Castle is probably covered by a tent right now, and won’t be uncovered until 2014.
For my second trip out I went to Kyoto. It’s cherry blossom season right now, and I hear that Kyoto has the best. I probably left it a little too late, I think the blossoms would’ve been better if I went last weekend instead. Some of them had already fallen off the trees, but they were still very nice to look at.
After arriving, I first went to Noji Castle. It’s a UNESCO World Heritage site. I heard there was lot good blossoms there.
Nijo Castle was one of my favourite sites during the whole weekend. It’s a Tokugawa castle, from the early 1600s. The place was amazing, but I couldn’t take as many photos as I’d hoped, because cameras were banned from the inside sections. Inside the paintings were amazing. Murals of cranes, eagles and pine trees covered all the meeting rooms. The floor was a nightingale floor, which squeaked as you walked across it to alert the guards of people attempting to enter the castle. Even the roof, which was divided up into hundreds of tiny panels were all meretriciously painted. Everything was in really good condition, I think it must’ve been restored very recently. The garden was great too. The moat surrounding the castle had koi
swimming around in it, and the gardens were beautiful and green. There was a lot of water in the form of ponds and such, even a small waterfall. The cherry blossoms were great. Probably the best on the whole trip. Upon entering the castle grounds, you could take a map which showed the location of every single cherry blossom tree, told you what species they were, and what time they expected to bloom. It was in Japanese only, so I can’t read much of it. I didn’t use it anyway, because you will probably see all the trees anyway just by walking around the castle grounds. As I left I passed by some kind of precession. I think it might’ve been a wedding. There was a litter being pushed along by three guys in what looked like religious costume. Inside was a man in a suit and a woman in a white dress, and it was being followed by more men in suits and women in dresses. Because of this I think it might’ve been a wedding ceremony, but I can’t find any information about Japanese wedding ceremonies being held in this fashion. 
After Nijo I got a bit lost. Wandering around hopelessly, I stumbled upon Higashi Honganji (which means East Temple of the Primal Vow). Unlike it’s brother, Nishi Honganji (West Temple of the Primal Vow) it’s not a UNESCO World Heritage site, but I was still extremely impressed.
Higashi Honganji is a Buddhist Temple, and although pretty small, absolutely beautiful. It’s considered one of the central temples to ‘Shin Buddhism’, but I don’t know anything about that. There was an huge dragon statue outside which spewed water from its open mouth. 
Again, inside I wasn’t allowed to take photos. There was a ceremony being held when I entered. Around 30 people were kneeling, the monks were chanting and banging on the gong. I sat and watched for a little while, and then left for my hotel room.
I wanted to visit Gion that evening to try and catch the sight of a Geisha, but I couldn’t find my way there. Compared to Nagoya, it wasn’t a very easy city to travel around in. Nagoya is the only other large Japanese city I’ve been in, and I was amazed at how easy it was to find my way around. On my very first trip I felt comfortable with getting from place to place, but in Kyoto, it seems the most efficient method of travel is by bus, and Japanese buses are pretty daunting (I guess I’ll tell you about them another time). There also a lot of smaller train routes, but not all these trains link back to the central Kyoto station. So I couldn’t find my way to Gion, I guess I’ll attempt again another time.
My hotel was pretty good. I stayed at the Ark Hotel. I got my single room for 5000 yen, which I think was a bargain. It was a very nice hotel, with a private bathroom and a nice room, and only around 1000 yen more expensive than the nearby capsule hotels. I think I might’ve got a last-minute-deal since I booked my hotel the day before my stay.
There was a restaurant and a bar but I didn’t scope out either. I think the most interesting thing was this bedside cabinet, where there were buttons for the air conditioning, the lights, an alarm clock and the radio. the FM Kyoto station actually was a bilingual station, with the host first speaking in English then in Japanese. All the songs were in English too, but most of them were laughable such as “The Monster Mash” and “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini.” It was still nice to listen to some English radio!
It rained most of the next day, I first headed out to the International Manga museum – because I’m a big nerd. It was great, and there were things that I’m sure all my nerd buddies would love, such as an original copy of Akira and a storyboard for Neon Genesis Evangelion. Again, no photos allowed inside the actual museum. The museum had a great library collection. Thousands of books which anybody could just take down and read. Of course, nearly all of them were in Japanese, but there is a very small foreign language section.
What I found most interesting is the Japanese definition of ‘manga’. For western geeks like myself, manga means a Japanese comic book (and sometimes can also mean other Asian comics – usually Chinese and South Korean). But in Japan, it seems like the term 
manga refers to any comic. The museum displayed copies of Watchmen, Action Comics, and Tintin. There was a joint Japanese / French sci-fi exhibit. There were comics such as Astroboy which I’d refer to as manga, and French comics which I’d either call ‘comics’ or ‘graphic novels’. But to the Japanese – they were all manga! Even a big cardboard book of the Japanese version of The Very Hungry Caterpillar was on display (and I’m proud to say I could read almost all of it)! I scoped out the English section and read a manga for myself. I can imagine it would be a good place to visit if you’re a poor student. It’s just a couple-hundred yen for a child admission, and you could spend all day reading the manga for free. I hoped that during the few hours I spent in the museum the rain would’ve cleared up, but it looked like it had actually got worse.
After than I caught the subway back to Kyoto station and walked to Nishi Honganji. I was so impressed by the lesser Higashi Honmachi yesterday I really wanted to see the bigger, better one – and th
e UNESCO World Heritage site. However, I was honestly pretty disappointed. I think most of that disappointment was because it was undergoing renovations. A lot of the buildings were covered with scaffolding and barriers blocked off parts being worked on. When I visited Higashi Honganji yesterday the doors were open which was a sign they were allowing visitors in, but in this temple all the doors were closed. I did open them and peek inside, and what I saw through the crack was very impressive. But there were people inside mediating so I don’t think I was allowed in. Maybe I would’ve enjoyed it more if I could’ve seen the inside. It was a lot bigger, I’ll admit – but overall it didn’t feel like anything special.
My last stop was to Toji another Buddhist temple. It was around 15 minutes by foot away from Nishi Honganji. During that 15 minute walk, on two separate occasions, random Japanese people offered me their umbrellas. The second guy actually spoke pretty good English. He told me his house was just over there, and to take it, but I refused both times. Not long after meeting the second guy, I found an umbrella broken and discarded in the bushes. It was easy to fix, I just had to clip the fabric back onto the frame. The handle was broken too, but I actually didn’t notice until hours later when I was going home. I thought it was just supposed to be a stump shape – but it looks like it was once a ‘u’ that was snapped off. So I adopted the umbrella and took it home with me.
Toji was beautiful – the garden was full of Sakura. However the rain had knocked many of them off the trees – so the trees looked pretty naked and the ground was covered by a carpet of pink and white petals. 
People weren’t allowed into the pagoda (it was even surrounded by barbed wire to keep you out!). There’s lots of other buildings in the compound though, full of statues of Buddha. One of them must’ve been around four metres tall, and then was also sitting on a raised platform, so even the base of the statue was above my head. The statues were my favourite thing about Toji. They were so surreal. Part of the statue was a background, full of swirling interlocked lines – a little like a Celtic knot. I looked at it for a while, not quite seeing why it was so strange but knowing it was – and then I noticed. Amongst the swirls were smaller Buddha… so in the statue there would be one huge Buddha, and then in the radiance behind him was seven smaller Buddhas.
One thing I really like about Japan is the juxtaposition between the old and the new. Through the main gate of Toji you could see a Pachinko parlour. One one side of the wall, a temple built in in the 800s, and on the other, a vibrant, modern gambling business, with neon lights and punk rock blasting every time the doors open. 
After that I caught a train back to Fukuchiyama. I had a lot of fun, and I think I’ll like to visit Osaka next. I love Fukuchiyama. I love the atmosphere, I love how pretty it is, I love the quiet – the one thing I don’t like is how much it costs to get anywhere. Kyoto is probably the closest major city, but to get to Nagano for example, could set me back over 10 000 yen each way. I’d love to do more travelling, but I’m pretty thrifty and I don’t like the thought of spending so much on a 2-3 day trip.
Anyway I’m going to put the rest of the photos in the photo album so you can see them all. Hopefully it won’t be so long until I update again!
I found out today that my placement has changed from Matsue City to Fukichiyama. I asked for a small city when I applied, and this one is tiny! Only 82 000 people. I can’t find much information on it. Here’s the Wikipedia article. It’s not even in Lonely Planet.
I think the move is a good thing. I’m closer to larger cities like Osaka, and the city itself is even smaller. I wish I could find out more about it however.
Well this is my first post. I’m getting ready to leave. Only 9 days to go now. I picked up my visa yesterday, and it’s extremely impressive. It’s plasticy to the touch, and it’s covered by holograms (you can start to see one on the right hand side of the Visa). The white thing on the top page is my Certificate of Eligibility. It was sent to me from my employers in Japan, and I couldn’t apply for a visa without it. The man at the embassy said that it’d be removed when I arrived. He also said that my photo and fingerprints would be taken upon arrival.
I’ve also packed most of my stuff. I weighed my bag, and it seems to be somewhere between 18 and 20 kilos. There’s still things I need to put in it, like shoes and t-shirts, so the weight is a little worrying.
Well not much else to say for now. My final prac teaching session is this Saturday. I’ve watched the video and done a little preparation, but I still have more to do before the date. I hope I do better this time.
I leave on the 4th of February. First I’ll spend two weeks in Nagoya for training, and then I’ll move to my placement of Matsue. Here’s a link to the Wikipedia page, and here’s one for a tourism page. Lonely Planet even has a little bit to say about it. I am thrilled about my placement because I wanted to work in a smaller town. There seems to be a few interesting things to see, but I have a feeling I’ll be traveling around the country for most of my sight-seeing.
