Thoughts from Kyoto - January 8

Tommy Lee Jones is EVERYWHERE.

A very nice, but expensive restaurant.

Thus ends my first full day in Japan. We’re still in orientation so nothing much about classes yet, just some stuff about how our schedule will be, some things we have to do as we settle into Japan such as get internet access, foreigner registration cards that allow us to get things like cell phones, and other miscellaneous things like that which are important but generally easy to overlook. Not having consistent internet access has been quite an interesting experience – 6 weeks in China without internet was about the longest I’ve gone for awhile, and it’s a bit scary to see how quickly I returned to my utterly-dependent-on-internet state after returning to the US. I was able to check my mail and get on Facebook for a little while, and it was interesting to read about what’s going on with my friends and what not – I don’t think I’ve fully realized that I’m not really going to be in the same world as them until next Fall, and by then a bunch of them will have graduated from Michigan, and who knows if I’ll ever see them again.

I should really test out my microphone on MSN to see if it works. I don’t want to be too attached to friendships and things in the States while I’m here in Japan because I think the experience suffers overall, but there are times when I want to be able to hear my friend’s voices. Especially Kopis, since we sound great.

So far we’ve definitely been using Japanese consistently – I think one of our future professors put it best: essentially, you must live in Japan, speak in Japanese, *think* in Japanese. In other words, it must be absolutely normal, which is exactly what is so abnormal for most of us. Something that is pretty cool is the fact that people don’t stop and stare at you on the street, which was a fairly common occurrence in China. It doesn’t happen to me personally, just because I blend in with my active camouflage, but it is interesting to see how accustomed the people of Kyoto are to obvious foreigners. I think it’s probably because there are a fair number of foreign students studying at Kyoto University (Kyodai), so we’re not exactly rare. We’ve met some of the Kyodai students, and they’re really nice. Hopefully I’ll be able to join one or two clubs and hang out with more Japanese people.

Not really much to say yet, except that it’s taking me a while to learn all my future classmate’s names, and what schools they are from. I haven’t really thought about the fact that I’ll be basically creating an entirely new set of friendships and relationships for the next four months – it’ll definitely be great to get to know these kids from other schools. Hopefully, I’ll get a better taste not only of what Japan is like, but also about other regions of the US.

Also, food can get ridiculously expensive here. It’s aggravated by the fact that the Japanese yen is at a 13-year high or something, which means foreigners exchanging money are coming at an unlucky time. I can foresee many meals of ramen or onigiri (rice balls) in the future when cash is getting a bit low. Ironically, convenience stores aren’t as big of a deal to me as they are to some of my friends here. It’s probably because Taiwan has definitely gotten the Japanese 7-11 imitation down to an absolute art, and thus the stores feel almost exactly the same. However, we’re still lagging a bit behind in the whole vending machine department. You can’t compare vending machines of the world with Japan at all – they sell basically everything, including “contraband” such as alcohol, cigarettes… and they’re just everywhere.

It’s still a really new experience for me overall but most definitely a clear contrast between going to say, Indonesia where I couldn’t speak the language at all, and English only went so far. You *really* need to know the language of a country before you go if you want a full experience…