Afterword (or stuff that didn't fit in the main narrative)
Impossible Parking.
The streets are narrow and the cars are tiny but the parking spaces were even smaller. We saw some vehicles parked in places and ways that questioned the laws of physics. Mieko often seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time going forward and back while trying to perfectly line up her vehicle in the parking spot and our taxi driver did the same. Could this be yet another strange unrecognized Japanese custom?
And this is on the drivers side The street didn't seem wide enough to allow this
Interesting Gadgets
Ja asked if I picked up any interesting gadgets during my visit and we did find a couple. The Japanese live in small expensive spaces and pay super high prices for housing. Because it's unreasonable to spend money fixing up your apartment, most of their extra income can be spent on gadgets. Mieko showed me a small battery operated device with two rotating wheels visible through a hole at the top. She explained it was for filing your nails after you cut them. Her main floor vacuum was a ni-cad charged affair with a tiny collection container. She also had a small tabletop vacuum slightly larger than a rubic's cube that could be pushed around a counter top to pick up dust and crumbs.
At a small tourist shop Akira showed me a half-pencil sized model of a katana which, if you draw the blade, was actually a earwax cleaner. One of the gadgets we actually bought was a product called beans which were weighted plastic balls inside a vaguely bean shaped rough foam bag. You can push these through the opening in 2 liter soda bottles and clean the inside by shaking. I'm not sure how well they work but it seemed worth a shot.
There were, of course, high tech toilets in every place we stayed and M had a video doorbell installed near the dining area. I've already mentioned the remote for filling and heating the bathtub from the kitchen. At the department stores we saw all sorts of interesting things including some nifty ice shaving machines I would purchased if I had room and solar powered anime characters and plants that slowly jiggle their bellies or leaves when exposed to the light. I was jealous of the things they had that you can't get here.
Table vaccuum Bathtub controls in the kitchen The video doorbell
Some pamphlets for robot kits My rolling clock
Children's books
I mentioned I spent a lot of time going through the wide variety of books on beetles in every bookstore I visited. This is obviously a fad among children in Japan but it could have very well have been the same here; I don't normally pay attention to such things. A few days after getting back I had to go to the grocery store and decided to wander into bookstore that was on the way and check out the kids section to see what current elementary school kids were interested in. The difference was startling and depressing. In our local borders bookstore (a small store in the local mall) about 40% of the children's floorspace was ads and merchandise based on the pirates of the caribbean movie that had just come out - if this is just one store it's hard to imagine how much disney paid for marketing. Another 10-20% of the children's section was devoted to disney books concerning the various cartoons. The next largest section was a shelf for very young children; pre-schoolers and toddlers. I wandered the shelves looking for the types of 'read and learn' books I had seen all over japan but there was nothing. It was almost like there was a big gap in the shelves between preschoolers and young adults and disney was the only merchant filling this area. I'm hoping this small bookstore isn't indicative of most stores in America - that would be too depressing.
The Japanese Alphabet
The japanese alphabet is seriously messed up. I asked A about the writing system and he went over the history a bit. I'm still not sure I understand it all.
Originally Japan didn't have a native written language - at some point scholars travelled to China and brought back their logographic writing system called kanji. This was great but there were problems. The Japanese and the Chinese speak different languages and so though the meanings of the symbols were the same the intonation was different. To help work around the difference, they accepted a second alphabet: hiragana. This is a phonetic alphabet with characters representing sounds rather than ideas. Hiragana is used for adopted foreign words (words that don't have kanji logographs). Somewhere (and this is where I'm unclear) they decided to discriminate the Chinese pronunciation from their own by writing hiragana characters after the kanji characters. Thus, if I understand correctly (probably not) they write the word 'table' with the scribble that represents table followed by the phonemic characters for 'able'. This combination of logograms and phonemes is called kana.
In my kids book about insects the text contains words that are written in kana but with tiny scripts of hiragana above the kanji to help a child know how to pronounce the non-phonetic (and possibly unknown) kanji characters.
To confuse it further, they have yet another alphabet called katakana which is used for foreign words or for emphasis. It's also a phonetic alphabet but different from hiragana. And because obviously that isn't confusing enough, some of the characters in hiragana are the same as katakana and you need to be able to tell them apart from context.
They also typically use arabic numerals but there are also representations in Kanji. So adding it all together, the Japanese have to learn kanji, hiragana, katakana, english, and arabic numerals. It's no wonder the government is constantly trying to reduce the pool of characters they have to know and why they legislate a specific pool of 1,006 characters a child is expected to know by the sixth grade and 1,945 by junior high. This is not counting the additional 290 characters used for names.
Also, you read japanese depending on which direction the characters are written. If the characters are organized vertically you read them from top to bottom and from right to left (starting on the right side of the book and ending on the left side). If they characters are written horizontally you read from left to right like a normal english book.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_language
On a related note, I asked A if there were regional dialects within Japan. Apparently there are. Apart from pronunciation and mannerisms being different between areas, if you took a speaker from the far north and had him try to speak with someone from the far south, it's likely they wouldn't understand anything the other was saying.
The Notebook
Before the trip I purchased a small spiral notebook for taking notes on the sights and activities I experienced in japan. It turned out to be really useful and I carried it with me everywhere. Typically, before going to sleep or whenever I had a bit of free time I would take it out and try to remember all the things I learned and what we accomplished that day. It soon became clear that this was a really useful thing to be doing because with my poor memory I often couldn't remember what had happened the same morning. In the end though I didn't plan it, I managed to fill the notebook completely from cover to cover with writing, small drawings, japanese words, and rubber stamps and I used up about 4cm of ink in my pen.
The notebook had an insert with pockets that was very handy for tickets, pamphlets, and postcards collected along the way.
Overpriced postcards
A lot of places had stamps to collect
Getting around in the neighborhood
There were no street names in M's neighborhood. There are house numbers and there is a big map of the neighborhood with the names of people living each house. The neighborhood community seemed much stronger than we have here. Akira told stories of his neighborhood children playing on baseball teams against the teams in other neighborhoods. On our last day M received a folder in the mail. It was a neighborhood report used as a means of keeping neighbors in touch with each other and informed about (very) local events. Each neighbor is expected to read the packet, add anything they might find useful and then stamp it with their personal stamp and pass it along. I don't know why there isn't this sense of community here.
Incidentally, the Japanese use official stamps for printing their names on official papers, bank statements, or anywhere where they would be expected to sign their name. We saw the raw stone that could be carved with your family name at the stationary store.
The local neighborhood map The neighborhood newsletter
Writing to Akira's parents
I asked A about sending his mother a thank-you note and he gave me the following information:
My parents' address is written in either of the following 2 ways:
- 270-0135 Chiba Nagareyama Nonoshita 5-1053-26, Japan
- 5-1053-26 Nonoshita Nagareyama Chiba 270-0135, Japan
The first one is in the order we write it:
- Zip code (270-0135)
- Prefecture (Chiba)
- City (Nagareyama)
- Local area (Nonoshita)
- House number (5-1053-26)
The second one is the way you write (backwards!!) and either way works (I've tried both).
I usually write in our order all written in Japanese (like in the attachment) and just add "Japan" at the bottom.
As in the attachment, "sama" is the standard for addressing anyone in mail but in English you can just use Mr. and Mrs. Kato.
I don't know how much it costs to send postcards or letters ... it's been so many years since I've done that. I remember it being like 40 cents to send a postcard from here to Japan but twice as much the other way around.
The singing highschool
Akira told us his high-school was known for it's singing and they would sing everywhere when they went including on field trips. They got strange looks when they were singing in the train stations.
I don't have anything to add to this. I just thought it was weird
A contest to take the most pictures
During the trip we had an informal contest to see who could take the most pictures. The outcome of this contest was perhaps a no-brainer considering we were competing against a japanese person with a superior camera and a 2GB memory card. Still for the first several days things were really close. I suspect the novelty of our situation gave me an advantage in the beginning. I think we counted the pictures taken before the wedding and it was something like 414 versus 417 - Akira being only slightly ahead. The next day he showed off by holding down the picture button on his camera and taking a continuous stream of images.
The contest became muddled somewhat during the wedding and afterwards when I was using his camera to take pictures. How do we count those? Ultimately however, we traveled to scenic places in japan he hadn't visited before and I didn't have a chance. In the end, we took a combined total of 4200 pictures and about 20-30 movies or about 5.2GB worth of data. This was transported on 9 cd's. After culling out of focus and redundant shots for this document I still had about 3GB worth of pictures. Further culling and shrinking the images to make them webfriendly brought the numbers down to ~2300 unique images taking only 1.7GB of space.
Incidentally, the Lumix cameras set a flag (internal to the jpg image) that tells the computer to rotate the image before it's displayed. This is nice when going through camera pictures because you don't have to rotate your head to view pictures that were taken vertically. The problem is that my automatic scripts for resizing images and making thumbnails don't retain this switch and after resizing I had to go back through all 2400 images and rotate the ones that were messed up again. It was a pain in the butt and because this was the third lossy jpeg render of the same image, the final image quality is pretty bad.
Also, because I wanted to have the pictures match up with the narrative I had to go through them looking for themes. We took a lot of pictures of strange advertisements through the taxi windows and they didn't really have much to do with the events of the day. I wanted to get these images together so that I could present them in bulk when discussing that topic. This meant going through the collection several times to find and collect these themed pictures.
Also, the pictures were sorted by the date we dumped them from the camera to the laptop. If the camera wasn't full or if we didn't get around to dumping pictures until the next morning, the image date didn't match the date they were sorted under. This required going through the entire picture collection again to make sure the images were topical and not redundant.
The final problem is we took pictures with three different cameras which each named the digital images according to their own numbering scheme. So for each day I would often be left with 300-400 images in three sets; one for each camera. This meant going through the days events and finding all the pictures for a certain topic. After these images had been found, I would have to separate them and try to cull out all the redundant or out of focus pictures. It was really labor intensive and was the reasont I so severly underestimated the time it would take to get this thing posted.
All in all I probably went through the entire picture collection of ~3000 pictures 6-10 times.
Children's infomercials
I saw a couple shows that were like infomercials targeted at children. Glossing over how incredibly immoral this seems to be, some of the toys they showed were pretty interesting. The hosts demonstrated a puzzle game with a moving train travelling on a series of slidable tiles on a board. You had to slide the tiles - containing the track - to keep the train from derailing. I was funny to watch the hosts screw up and try to cheat. Another game was particularity interesting. It consisted of a small cylindrical device they attached to their waist with a belt. Cords stretched from this device to their wrists (and knees? - I can't remember) This was (mechanically?) attached to the game board which had two mechanical swimmers mounted on tracks set in a painted pool setting. By rotating your arms and pumping your legs you could get the swimmers to move down the pool. When they reached one end they would flip over and go the other way. When the host lost to his visiting guest (an 30yo actor from a school themed soap opera) he had to submit to getting his wrist slapped by the guest using two fingers. He rolled around on the ground screaming in fake agony.
Vending machines
We saw vending machines all over Japan. They were everywhere and A complained that seeing the machines ruined the scenery. They were also a source of great delight for us because of the strange drinks they contained. We took many pictures of vending machines and the drinks they contained.
Amino-vital Volvic A very small $5 drink Qoo
Energy Gym Love body and Amino-value
Akria says he grew up on Pocari sweat Kit-kat drink? Tea-Soda!
Glamorous Body Dekka-Vita C, Bikkle, and Bubble man II soda planet
Signs, notices, and instructions
The other thing that was a source of great amusement during the trip was spotting signs, notices, and instructions. Engrish prevailed in most official instructions or warning signs and the signs often used anime characters to get their point across. Here are some pictures.
Don't litter here
Don't let them pee here
Geography
After the trip while I was swamped with the task of sorting through and collating the pictures (but crucially after I had already written the text), Akira sent me a bunch of screenshots and google earth bookmarks of places we visted in Japan. It would have been nice to insert them into the main narrative in some sort of intuitive way but it would take way too much time. Here are the images and bookmarks he supplied.
Joyful Honda Parent's house Closer image of parent's house
Obstacle course park Shinjuku station The airport in relation to things The larger picture
Tokyo Tokyo Big Sight Yamanote Line
Kyoto Nara Large buddha site
Google Earth Bookmarks
- byodoin_temple(10yen_coin)
- nijo_castle(we_drove_by_this)
- nishi_honganji_temple(not_visited)
- sensoji_temple_in_tokyo
- ferris_wheel_1
- ferris_wheel_2
- kinkakuji_temple
- yodobashi_camera_in_akihabara_electric_town
- kyoto_station
- nara_hotel
- hagashi_honganji_temple
- supermarket_ito_yokado
- horyuji_temple(oldest)
- kyoto_station2
- togetsukyo_bridge
- joyful_honda
- wedding_location
- shinjuku_station
I can take requests
I can supply high resolution pics of any of images here. They were resized before being posted because they would have taken up way too much space and bandwidth otherwise.
History
These webpages were written up in the two months that followed the trip. It was a lot of work but I'm happy with the result.
In 2010, I converted the pages into restructured text and rebuilt everything for the new webpage layout. This process took about six hours. I'm still happy about the result.
Update 100906
Shamara and Akira got divorced a few years after this trip. I don't know the details of the breakup - and I don't really want to know.
We're still friendly but it was pretty depressing reading through this document with the knowledge it ultimately didn't work out. I had a great time and I feel bad I can't repay Mieko somehow.
I've been studying Japanese and I want to go back. I'm sure another trip to Japan would be awesome but I don't think anything could match the excitement and novelty of the wedding in Japan.