Holiday Season in Japan!

I've done it again, I totally forgot about my blog. It's hard to come on here and update every day, especially when I'm just trying to enjoy every last day I have left. The end of my stay here in Japan is inching closer and closer, it's hard to even think that within months I'll be setting foot back in Australia for the first time in almost 12 months.

I think instead of long winded accounts of my time since my last blog entry, I'll keep this one shorter and a bit more focused. It's that time of the year again, it's Christmas time, a time that even comes around every year here in Japan! This country with a tiny percent of Christian population, even here the holiday comes in full force.

Walking down the streets of Kyoto it's hard to forget that the holiday you either love or hate is drawing nearer and nearer. Bright lights hang from the shopping streets, giant Santa's climbing chimneys hang from the roof. Kyoto Station has an amazing, gigantic Christmas tree making it even more beautiful than usual. That, and no matter where you go there are fantastic light displays everywhere. Here they call them simply 'Illumination', and they're a much bigger part of Christmas here than they are in Australia.

One of the biggest, is Kobe's Luminaire. I went to see this with a few friends about a week ago, and it was amazing. It's essentially a gigantic light structure that is put up every year and has been going since the tragic Kobe earthquake. Words and photos can't do it justice. It is just amazing.





One thing is very different about the holiday season in Japan, though. It is very commercial (One could argue it's commercial everywhere, though), with little meaning beyond the decorations, lights and gifts. That, and instead of spending it with family members, it is a night for couples to spend together and go out for dinner. Meaning places are always booked out with mass amounts of couples wanting to spend a special night together.

In reverse, the upcoming New Year celebration is a very family orientated event for Japanese people. Lots of people living away from their extended families in other prefectures travel home for the period and there are a lot of traditional things to take part in. I'm looking forward to both experiences!

So how am I spending Christmas night? I will be going to dinner with my girlfriend, Erika and hopefully having a great night out, despite my predictions for awful crowds. I hope everyone back home has a very Merry Christmas, and of course a Happy New Year!

Chevalier College

Recently a group of kids from Chevalier College in Bowral, NSW, came to my school for about 2 weeks. Chevalier is sister schools with Murasakino, so it's a common event for kids from there to come here and kids from Murasakino to go to Chevalier for short exchanges. This group were students of Japanese at Chevalier and ranged in age from 13-17. They came with their Japanese teacher, as well as some other teacher aides as a class trip.

I'd been asked to help them out during their time here. Both by just being a bridge for communication and by helping teach them Japanese along with the people who usually teach me Japanese, a group of university student volunteers.

It was a great 2 weeks. It was very odd to have this group of 14 or so Australians suddenly hanging around the place, but I soon got used to it and it was a welcome change. Actually, being around them made me notice just how much I myself had changed since I came here. At times it was hard to fit in, and I found myself being more comfortable around the Japanese students than the Australian ones! That said, they were a great bunch of people, and it was a pleasure having them around for that time.

Birthday

On December 3rd I finally turned 18. Back home in Australia this means I'm a full fledged adult. Gaining the ability to drink, smoke, vote, and a million other responsibilities I'm sure. In Japan it means I'm allowed to marry haha.

Japan's age of adulthood is 20, meaning most of the things Australian kids do to celebrate their coming of age are off-limits here for me. Interestingly enough, I am old enough to go to clubs and gamble in Pachinko parlours (Most other forms of gambling are illegal), but not anything else. My birthday started off lacklustre. I didn't feel like I'd turned 18, and it was a school day to boot.

A lot of people just had no idea it was actually my birthday, although I had received some really nice midnight emails from friends wishing me the best, and one of my closer friends at school went to the effort of buying a present, which made me really happy.

It got better, I guess. By the end of the week I had eaten 3 different cakes from different people, each with my name written on a sign made out of chocolate on the top. They were really delicious, and it was the first time I can remember receiving a personalised cake like that in a fairly long time. So to get 3 in one year was amazing!

I am 18 now. The change didn't happen over night, I think I've slowly becoming more and more like an 18 year old adult over this whole year. If I had spent this time in Australia, I feel like I might have been able to drink and all, but I probably still would have had the mindset of a kid.

JLPT

December 2nd marked the 2007 日本語能力試験 (Japanese Language Proficiency Test) for me here in Kyoto. I was fairly confident about it, seeing as I ended up opting to take 3rd Level, despite being told I should be able to go for 2nd Level by a few people. After sitting the exam I can say they were probably right, after all. Level 3 was a bit too easy and I often found myself finishing the exams too quickly and having a lot of time left over.

I suppose in retrospect it might have been better to challenge myself a bit more, although there's always next year. The results get sent out in February so then I'll know for sure exactly how I did.

The day started off pretty routinely. I woke up, got ready, and got a lift from my host dad to a nearby train station where I was meeting some friends who were also taking the exam. From there we walked to Kyoto University and were running a bit short on time. En route I noticed I'd forgotten to bring any form of ID. The book we got sent told us to bring either our Alien ID Card or a Passport along, and I had neither. After panicked emails to host family and whatnot, it turned out I didn't even need them. They weren't asked for even once.

Did anyone else reading sit the exam? I'd like to know how others thought about the difficulty.

Host Change

I changed host families yet again, making this the third and final family I will live with in Japan. As always the change was met with a bit of worry and the like. I had adjusted well to life with my second family and was anxious about the new one. I found out, that actually, they were people I had already met before. They hosted a Thai girl that came to my school briefly, and I had met them to go to a festival together and visited their house before. It gave me a bit of relief and I felt like the move would be okay.

Thankfully, it was. I've managed to adjust well to this family too, and it's taken a bit. I've had to sacrifice stuff like morning showers, but benefited by being a lot closer to school - a 10 minute commute compared to a 1 hour plus commute at the previous home.

The family is really interesting. The mother, father, 2 sisters (20 and 23) and grandmother and grandfather all live at home. There is a brother who lives in Tokyo at the moment, too. Both sisters are easy to get along with and always interesting, and the family is in general very warm and friendly. I'm glad I've got to experience 3 very different, very positive home stays while I've been here.

The picture above is of my second family, the Ota family.

PIEE Trip and Speech Contest

Since I have a day free, I figure I should go back a bit and talk about some of the larger things that have happened since my last update. On November 23-25th I went down to Tokyo yet again to take part in the PIEE trip, which meant meeting up with heaps of people I hadn't seen since our first orientation in Tokyo.

A few of the other guys living in the Kansai region and I decided to go down by night bus. This was either a good money saving idea, or a bad idea period. It was difficult to sleep, since they kept turning the lights on and speaking over the microphone every time they stopped, and besides that it was just uncomfortable. They made a pit stop at about 3am and we braved the freezing cold to get drinks from the vending machines and make use of the toilets. When I say freezing cold, I mean it. It was ridiculously cold outside, especially after having been in the warm bus for so long.

We arrived in Tokyo early in the morning, and met up with Azuma, a guy that works for PIEE and he took us around Ginza which was not all that interesting. Maybe it was just being really tired, but looking at pens wasn't what we were wanting to do. Besides this, I had been developing a very sore throat since the day before the trip and wasn't feeling tops. We had delicious ramen for lunch, but that was the only real saving point.

After meeting everyone at 1pm, we headed off to Akihabara. One of the places I could have gone without going to. Sure, it's typical geek Japan culture, with no lack of dirt cheap electronics and suspect anime (Japanese animation) stores with even more questionable customers, but I'd already been there before and I feel there's so much more to Japan that they should be promoting besides anime and stereotypical geek culture.

In Akiba we split up into groups. Our group went to karaoke. Totally un-Akiba, and it was a short 1 hour trip due to time constraints, but fun nonetheless. I sung with a strained, sore throat... probably not the best idea. After meeting up again we headed back to the Olympic Center; the same place we spent a week at for our orientation. It was as we remembered, with the horrible food and all.

The next day was our big trip to Nikko, a very famous place known for the Toshogu Shrine, as well as famous waterfalls. We spent hours and hours on a bus, which wasn't the best. The trip there sucked, to put it simply. I was even more sick, I hadn't slept the night before and the heating in my room was so weak as to not be existent at all. That said, after that it was fun. We had a nice, very traditional, Japanese lunch. Saw some amazing architecture at the Shrine, went to the waterfall which was beautiful and covered with snow and ice. Then it was back home. With a short stop for Mos Burger dinner.

I slept much better that night, despite it being a late one, and then we were up bright and early for a trip to Odaiba. Odaiba is a manmade island in Tokyo, and home to the famous Fuji Television Station. I'd been there before, so it didn't bother me that our stay was a bit short. We broke into groups again and the group I was with visited Fuji TV, taking lots of touristy photos, and then lunch in a nearby mall.

After Odaiba we all split up and had to go home. We had decided to take the Shinkansen home, which I was happy of... being very sick by this point. The cold I had caught lasted over a week and wasn't much fun at all.

Another highlight was the speech contest held by PIEE in Osaka on December 15th. All the PIEE students from Kansai were supposed to attend, but the turnout wasn't that grand. About 8 of us showed up with speeches to present in Japanese. That said, the prizes weren't too bad. There were prizes for everyone. Ranging from an iPod shuffle, an electronic dictionary, and then the dud prizes like... gloves, hot packs, a calender, photo album and maid cookies.

My speech was about my own experience here in Japan and how I feel I have changed as a person because of it. I ended up winning first prize and chose the iPod, since nothing else really spoke to me haha. I was surprised and happy to win! I think the crunch line was the fact that I had tried to set the content of my speech apart from the rest.

Long Time, No Blog

It's been at least 2 months since my last update here, and I have been meaning to change that for awhile. Thing is, whenever I sit down and actually have the time and energy to blog, my brain isn't exactly in the mood. I keep thinking of what I could write about and I think about it so much that I never decide on anything. Should I write about my day to day life? About the oddities and differences I notice every day in Japanese culture? Should I be writing for myself, or for an audience? Well this time I'm not going to think about anything and just let it run its course. Hopefully the result is somewhat coherent and understandable.

I said I would blog about a family trip to Nagano, but never did, and won't be dedicating this entry to it now. It was too long ago, and it the memories are still pretty vivid, but I don't feel like digging down and writing a long entry about it after so much time. I will say that it was fantastic, a real change of scenery. We stayed at a nice Japanese style hotel where I was treated to my first Onsen experience (Which was about as nice as bathing with total strangers can be, really), wearing a yukata and eating a ridiculously traditional and very expensive looking Japanese dinner. We went in a cable car over 3000m high and got to walk around at the top of the mountain, seeing wild monkeys, lots of cloud and some great scenery. Not much of a view down though, thanks to the aforementioned cloud.

After returning to school we soon had the school Bunkasai/Gakuensai (Culutral/School Festival). It was a great success and probably one of the highlights of my time at school here. Basically, every class puts together a performance of some sort. My school did the 2nd year performances on the Big Ground (Oval, minus the grass) and all the 2nd year classes put together individual dance routines with different themes and stories. Our class decided on a Pirates VS Ghosts theme for ours, starting with the Pirates waking the ghosts, then fighting them and eventually becoming friends and splitting into pairs to dance. It involved a pirate-specific dance (or ghost-specific, for the ghosts... I was a pirate) as well as the pair dance to be memorized. As such we had a LOT of practices. This involved being at school all day on Saturdays and Sundays (Often till about 5 or 6pm) and staying back on school days (Until around 6 or 7pm) for the weeks leading up to the festival. It was the best part though, I was able to feel like a real member of the class and bond with a lot of people I hadn't had a chance to yet.

The performance itself went well and I think if memory serves me right, we came 3rd in our year. Besides the bunkasai, we just recently had the Taiikusai (Sports Day), and I was entered into the 100m sprint thanks to a loss at Scissors/Paper/Rock. I expected to lose, and I did. I was unlucky put in a race with 4 other guys who were all undoubu (Sports Club) members and way more athletic than I. My loss was my slightly easier when everyone commented that I looked cool losing haha. What can I say to that? There were a lot more fun, non-serious events than in Australian carnivals. There were ones like the 6-legged race, where people had their legs tied together, or obstacles courses and such. Even one where you had to run out with a big elastic ring, pick up a sign with a description on it (Like... Person Wearing a Red Shirt, or a teacher's name etc.) and find a person in the crowd that matched the description, then tie yourselves together with the elastic before running to the finish line. The classes also had jump rope competitions where everyone in the class lined up and had to see how many jumps they could get in the time limit. We got 55 which wasn't too bad.

It's started to get really cold here, although there are still warm periods during the middle of the day. You really get the whole 4 seasons deal here in Japan, and they are proud of it. Japanese people will always say things like "Japan is the country of 4 seasons!", and then you may think "But, Australia has 4 seasons too! Doesn't every country?", but then you can see just how different the seasons are here. And you actually get the whole feel of the season. Autumn in Australia is a little colder, but little different... here the Maple Trees turn bright red before shedding all their leaves and it really is a sight to see.

I will definitely keep trying to upload photos and whatnot. I have had a lot of trouble with the program I was using not really wanting to work at all. So I will have to explore some options and get back to you. This all said, I will try to update more often. Sometimes I feel like I just want to keep the great memories in my head instead of forcing myself to write them down, but I suppose it's nice to keep a record and let people know what's going on.