Thoughts from Kyoto - January 11

Family gathering for the New Year's. My sincere apologies for crap photo quality.

Food!

It was a *really* nice Canon Camera.

Haruna trying out the camera.

Stuff outside.

Even the sewage system is down with emoticons!

The neighborhood.

Badass baiku.

Street Fighter IV looks really impressive. I went to a supposedly famous Japanese video arcade yesterday, and there were all sorts of newest-gen arcade games such as Tekken 6 and SF4…

As I mentioned a few days ago, something that struck me about Japan (or maybe this is limited to Kyoto) when I first got here was how similar it felt to other East Asian countries, and yet how different. I don’t think I was able to think of all the points at the time, so here’s another significant one, at least to me, which is that in Taiwan, most apartment buildings have metal bars for burglar deterrence – this is extremely pervasive, until you get high enough, such as the 6^th floor or something. For the most part, this is not the case in Kyoto. Even buildings that are only 3 stories high rarely have these metal bars, which I think definitely says something about how safe Japanese people think they are.

And in the “I’m a dumbass” category, I realized that I brought less underwear than I thought, forcing me to make a shopping trip to a nearby supermarket… where apparently, the clothing selection is pretty much endless, and I spent maybe 15 minutes trying to find what I wanted. But I successfully got Japanese briefs – now hopefully I didn’t misread the packaging, and they’ll be the right size.

Japanese family gathering. Wow. Hours and hours of food, noise, and fun. Although tomorrow is Monday, it happens to be a national holiday, for an adult rite of passage (turning 20). As such, it’s apparently a good time to celebrate the New Year, and so my host family had some relatives over for a nice party. I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m probably going to consciously or unconsciously adopt the Kansai-ben (dialect), because apparently that’s what everyone in the family speaks. For the most part it isn’t all that different from the Tokyo/official style that we learned back at Michigan (or probably at any Japanese program in the States), mostly some word changes. For example, “nai” (can’t) is replaced by “hen”, so for example: “nomenai” (can’t drink) is said, “nomehen”.

I’ve noticed that having alcohol at dinner seems to be a fairly typical thing – there’s definitely a major difference in the way people think about drinking in Japan, if you compare it to the United States. Now there are obviously good health arguments to make regarding a higher drinking age, but still I feel that the way Japan does it is better – the parents aren’t alcoholics, and just have some beer (or juice-like alcohol) at dinner, never too much. And kids will grow up noticing that, creating a framework in which alcohol is a rather everyday thing, and not something worth going crazy about. I feel like getting totally wasted just doesn’t seem attractive when it’s not strongly prohibited.

Learned to play some Japanese board games today – good stuff. I’ll try and teach it to y’all when I get back. On a side note, I’ve realized that either my camera really sucks, or I need to learn how to use it.. Anything less than broad daylight outside, and I can’t get a good steady shot – it’s always blurry. As a result, most indoor photos are absolute crap.