Thoughts from Kyoto - January 18

Apologies in advance for photos that are tilted on their side - I took quite a few with my cell phone camera, and I don't know how to rotate them using Blogspot's photo uploader.

Life has become… somewhat routine, which is actually quite interesting, in my opinion. If you had told me back in the fall that I would be getting up at 7 every morning and it’s freaking cold outside of your covers (since there’s no central heating) and I would then proceed to take 2 trains and walk to school overall taking an hour, I would have been rather incredulous. It’s fascinating what you’re capable of when you have to do it. Hopefully I can make this into a habit – getting up early and what not. They say that if you can do something for a month (or is it three weeks) then you can successfully develop a habit. I don’t know, let’s see if it works. It’s really cool when it seems like you have more hours per day, though currently that’s been sort of cancelled out by the 2 hours of travel time.

So after talking with other friends that are part of the KCJS program, I’ve come to realize that host families really are a hit or miss thing – you might have an awesome family, or one that has no idea what they’re doing. You might live an hour and a half away from Kyoto University, or you might be five minutes away. I honestly believe though that a lot of the experience is what you put into it. Now obviously that’s not to write off people’s negative experiences as completely their own fault, but the attitude and expectations you bring into this relationship has to have some impact.

Anyway, my point is that there are many factors that contribute to a good host family experience, some of which aren’t immediately obvious. For example, some students have trouble with strange Japanese foods their host families serve to them for dinner – maybe fish eggs or something that you don’t really see on an everyday basis back in the States. Now, everything I’ve had so far with my host family has been delicious, and I realized that one of the reasons for that is because I have two relatively young children in my family, and basically Mom finds it more pragmatic to cook foods that they’ll actually eat, which for the most part tends to be fairly conservative in terms of taste and ingredients. So, I benefit from that through “safe” food (taste-wise), though it’s certainly not something I would have realized beforehand. Of course, if you wanted to eat a bunch of really exotic Japanese foods, then maybe you wouldn’t be a fan. At any rate, my point is that you never know what can happen.

In the afternoon I went with Mom and Haruna to a nearby jinja (神社) – shrine, to pick up some sort of achievement of merit. I had no idea what it was about, but it sounded interesting. There are various aspects of Japanese culture that I’ve learned about before, whether in Taiwanese high school or college Japanese classes or manga, but seeing it for real and realizing that people actually really do it and it’s a perfectly integrated part of Japanese culture is… well, I don’t really know how to describe it. It shouldn’t really be surprising, but what I liked was how absolutely natural it felt – there doesn’t seem to be any need to intentionally take steps to preserve “Japanese” culture or customs, because it’s just carried down and on.

Shouma was out playing baseball from morning until late in the afternoon after we got back – and I’ll note that it was pretty damn cold outside, and raining on top of that. Japanese kids are *hardcore* about their sports or something. Thankfully, I don’t think he caught a cold. But on that topic though, it is somewhat frightening/inspiring how seriously Japanese people take things – Haruna’s bookbag that she takes to school everyday is *huge* - like, not carry-on luggage but checked luggage huge.

I seriously need a kotatsu.

The entrance to the shrine.

The shrine.

Alternative path to the shrine.

Some famous dude, I guess. Maybe the ancient minister of education. I know, I'm really ignorant.

The shrine was maybe 10-15 minutes away by car, and it seemed like it was in a forest or something, in its own little world away from the bustling randomness of the city. My camera actually died after taking just a few photos – apparently, of the two sets of rechargeable batteries I brought, one of them is essentially spent. As a result, I decided to try out my camera phone, since taking crappy photos of a new place is certainly better than no photos at all. Surprisingly, the quality was quite good – there are many options available, and the resolution can actually get up to 1200x1600, which was something that I did not expect at all. See if you can figure out which photos were taken via cell phone. After this, I’m definitely going to be using my camera phone a lot more – pity I probably won’t be able to use it back in the States. The one downside of it though was since it’s a prepaid phone, there’s no SD card I can use for easy data transfer, and thus I had to E-mail the photos one at a time to my Gmail… which was a rather clumsy process. All in all though, being able to send and receive E-mail with my cell phone is a very convenient function that I will probably be making the most of while I’m in Japan and still have this phone.

Anyway, we were there today because apparently all Japanese students know how to write calligraphy (and quite well, I might add), and thus submitted these writings to the shrine or something, for the sake of getting into a good school or something like that. I think there were various awards for the most well-written calligraphy or something like that. Since Haruna is also left-handed, she did the same thing I did when learning calligraphy; do it with the “right” (huk) hand even though when using a pencil we use our left hand. Regardless, her writing is hella prettier than mine.

Left-handers who write calligraphy with their right-hand unite!

Useful instructions.

I think this is the year of the ox or something, according to the Chinese zodiac, which apparently they also use in Japan, something I hadn’t realized up until now. The shrine had various statues of oxen all over the place, and I wondered out loud to my host Mom whether or not it was because this year is the ox year, and whether or not they replace the statues every year. Well it turns out… that shrine just happened to have the ox (and fox, and some other animals) as “good” animals. Whew. For one moment I was imagining some poor Japanese shrine workers replacing those ridiculously heavy statues every year.

I got to try out that thing where you toss a coin into a box, shake a large rope and ring a bell, then clap your hands and make a wish. (at least, I think that’s what I was supposed to do) When you go to a temple, you clap once but when you go to a shrine, you clap twice. I also saw other things that I’d read about before, such as protection from “bad years” (which is different for men and women), special ladles for washing your hands at the entrance and the whole nine yards.

Some Honda retailer or gas station or repair shop or something. This photo is just to show off the kid-friendly place they have. Customer service ftw!

All in all, a great culture class for me today.