Sunday
My sleep was alright. I really wish I had a shower. I look so greasy in all of these pictures. Holy fuck.
Daisuke and Nicole made me breakfast. We had yakisoba and onigiri. It was cool watching them cook. I appreciated getting a glimpse into what it’s like to live as a couple in Japan. We met Yuri, Aoba, and Nahian at Hirakata station. Our destination was Kyoto, The Golden Temple.
The train ride was fun. I talked with Yuri for the most part. Like Yui, she’s great for me to work on my Japanese with. Yuri puts in a lot of effort when texting me, giving me a Kanji, Hiragana, and English version to all of her texts. She’s super sweet. I showed her what my place looks like on Google Street, and she was amazed at Google Street’s functionality. When she was showing it off to Aoba and Yuya, she realized she was the only one out of the loop.
Kawaii.
After the already lengthy train ride, we road a bus that felt like forever to the Temple. I got to know Nahian more. He’s chill. He has Bangladeshi roots, but he’s from New York, NY.
Here are some pictures that I took once I finally arrived.
I didn’t go with them to dinner cause I felt that I was spending too much time away from home.
Monday
Today, I went with the host fam to Kouhei’s soccer event. The Osaka Gamba, the local professional soccer team here, ran an event for the kids. In all honesty, it was pretty boring, and the sun was beating down on me at 31 degrees, so that didn’t help much. But I got some Skyping done and I worked on my blog, so all was not lost.
After it was over, Kouhei reported that he was ticked because one of the professional players kicked him in the leg. He said, “pros shouldn’t kick kids!” pretty funny. Mayuko-san would later inform me that it was a fundraiser for a new stadium that they wanted to build.
Tuesday
So, my friend Nicole has been going through a bit of a health scare as of late. I’m unsure as to how much I am allowed to indulge into this, so I won’t, but it’s fairly serious. So much so that she’s considered the possibility of having to go back home. For the past 2 months she’s been dealing with this, and the doctors here in Japan have been turning her away. She’s been suffering aching, discomfort, among her other symptoms, and nothing she’s tried is helping. She’s been pretty stressed out. It’s really rough. The morale of the story is that general health care here isn’t on the same level that it is in North America.
Wednesday
Today Yuri gave me a small bento. She made food for both myself and her speaking partner. I was unbelievably stoked to receive it. My reaction was akin to receiving the gifts I had specifically asked for on Christmas as a child.
I don’t care what you think. I was stoked when I saw this. Unfortunately, I didn’t get any pictures of the tasty goodness inside, because before I could do anything, I ate it all.
Thursday
In class today, Professor Lind ran us through another thought experiment where he silently gave individual people in the class a contradictory goal to complete. Everyone got one of three instructions: move the chairs to the front entrance, move the chars to the window, and move the chairs to the centre of the room. For the first 5 minutes or so, it was havoc. Everyone was silently, and surprisingly courteously stealing each other’s chairs in order to complete their own task. At one point, everyone stood, protecting their stash of approximately 33% of the chairs. Since Professor Lind still seemed unsatisfied, I took control of the class. I proposed that we play Rock, Paper, Scissors to decide which goals we will complete first, second, and third. That seemed to do the trick.
After class, I ran into Nahian. He mentioned that he was gonna go watch the people from the dance club, Body, perform. Basically, Body is a group for people who want to perform various types of dance. I don’t know anything about dance, so I’m weary about telling you the styles I recognize, but I think I’ve seen hiphop, rocking, breaking…
I’ll shut up, these pictures can probably say volumes more than I.
What was really cool, was how low pressure everything seemed. Don’t get me wrong, the dancing was impressive. Pictures make it hard to show, but some of the guys could bust moves that could only make you assume they’ve spent years honing their craft. But some of the groups had huge diversity in how skilled each member was. The more skilled would show up in many different acts, usually as the forefront, and with them you could see, somewhat obviously, their less skilled peers dancing beside them. I would have expected the elite to be with the elite, with the noobs doing their own thing. Apparently that wasn’t the case. To add, the MCs added to the chill atmosphere. During intermissions, they’d initiate humorous dialogue between the audience and themselves, and at one occasion they even interviewed Nahian, testing his Japanese. The female MC came to me after having her fun with Nahian, but got interrupted as the next group appeared to be ready. Not gonna lie, I was pretty disappointed.
Another thing to keep in mind, is that this huge group of people, make up the Body circle, as opposed to a club. Clubs are usually known for being way more hardcore and demanding of your time. A Japanese circle is more or less the equivalent of a North American club, but the organization this circle was showing blew any club I had seen at SFU out of the water. It made me want to join them soooo badly.
Friday
After class, I didn’t really have any plans, but luckily Nicole did. She invited me to her friend Eddie’s place for another takoyaki party. Eddie, if it wasn’t obvious enough already, is an international student. He, along with my other friend, Frankie, attend the same American college as Nicole. Nicole and Daisuke picked me and Yuya up at the front of KGU, where we made our way to Eddie’s after. Before arriving, we picked up some food and drinks at a local grocery store. We figured the takoyaki wouldn’t be enough to fill us, so we got stuff for yakisoba too. Before leaving, we met Yuri and Yuya’s friend who’s name I’ll have to remember later.
Eddie’s place was sick. It was your typical rectangular shaped 1 bedroom apartment that persists throughout most of Japan (I’m assuming), but it’s clean, super close to the school, hardwood floors, new countertops, toilet, etc.
When Frankie came through the door with Sayaka, I was pretty surprised. I knew Frankie from before; Miki had introduced me to him and his girlfriend, Sayaka. I was surprised to see him at Eddie’s though, and even more surprised to hear that he’s from the same school as Nicole’s. I spent most of the night getting to know him, Sayaka, and Sayaka’s friends, Izumi and Asuka, better. Later, after I ran out of the 6 beers I bought, Frankie, one other, and I headed out to grab more booze. We went to this Wal-martish place, and I found, wouldn’t you know it, Canadian Club. I was stoked.
We went back to Eddie’s placed and chilled out. I took drinking pretty slow, as I was a bit weary of drinking heavily with new people, and of my incident a couple weeks back. The others didn’t holdback though. Izumi tanked through vodka shot after vodka shot, and Asuka and Sayaka held their fair share too. I think that marked the first time I had really seen any Japanese females drink so heavily. Afterward, Frankie, Sayaka, Izumi, and Asuka wanted to go to karaoke. I, of course, agreed happily to the invite. We packed the rest of my 26 of CC, and went on our way. Shots and singing was hella fun. I was surprised at how easy it was to sneak it in. I’ll definitely have to make that a staple decision to make.
Misc.
Saturday
At about 3 am, I realized I had plans to meet at 11:30 am at Hirakata station to go to Nipponbashi tomorrow with Valia and Kelsey. I also realized I needed sleep in order to do so. In response, I turned my own figurative lights out on the couch inside our karaoke box, and didn’t awake until 5 am. After paying, we walked a fair bit to Frankie and Sayaka’s place. The plan was for all of us to crash there, but we lost Izumi along the way. She rode off somewhere on her bike, and beyond that I don’t really know. She’s safe though.
After arriving, I plugged my phone into a power source, and passed out on the floor.
I woke up with just enough time to have a shower, and say a quick thanks for hosting me. I made it only 5 minutes late. Valia and Kelsey seemed amused.
The trip to Nipponbashi was kind of long. On our way to finding the Den Den Town, the area known for being Osaka’s Akihabara (a place known for selling manga/anime memorabilia and electronics), we stumbled upon a small fish market. I satisfied some of my hunger with a stick of battered tuna.
We made our way through shops, some more family friendly than others. After seeing one though, you’ve kind of seen them all. Figures of everything were on display and for sale, and though it was cool to see at first, once I got past the novelty of it, was kind of bored. When we were hungry, we made our way to a maid cafe. Ironically, said maid cafe didn’t have maid costume wearing staff. Instead, it was cosplay day, so they were in various cosplay outfits instead. Our server was cosplaying as Mikasa from Shingeki no Kyojin. She pulled it off really well. She was super nice and talkative, but the entire time I was shooting myself in the foot for not being able to talk with her. I was beside myself a bit. Valia held good conversation with her though. Since I couldn’t join them, I was doing a lot of people watching, to see the type of characters inside. Overall, it was pretty interesting and entertaining.
It was kind of expensive though.
When I got home, I knew that there was a talk with Mayuko-san waiting for me. Over the course of my time with them, I had been doing my almost absolute best to conform to what thought their expectations were. However, given that they speak fairly good English, I had been playing a bit on the dangerous side, feeling okay with testing the boundaries to see exactly what they were okay and not okay with. While I could have been playing it safe, in the end, this would result in me being not as happy with the arrangement as I could have been, had I actually tested for expectations.
Before coming to Japan, I had done my research on typical homestay life in Japan. One of the main cultural difference in Japan that was brought up to my attention is the way they deal with conflict. Apparently, typically, if a homestay parent disapproved of the way their homestay child was behaving, they would indirectly suggest that the behaviour should change. However, in the Mitsutani household, this doesn’t seem to be the case. Mayuko-san and Sei-san seem to be pretty damn direct about what they think I should and shouldn’t do, and everything they say has been extremely reasonable.
However, the main thing I was trying to get a grasp of is their expectation of how I conduct myself when I am not coming home at the usual times. I’ve been working on keeping Mayuko-san informed of when I was coming home and missing dinner and what not. I was also testing the waters for how much they wanted me to be at home.
This talk had to do with Friday’s night out. I had kept her properly informed about missing dniner on Friday, and then not returning home on Friday, but when I said, “I’d be home in the morning,” only to tell her at 10:30 am that I was going out to Nipponbashi, she let me know that something was off a bit, and that we’d talk about it when I got home. I was a little worried, enough for me to voice my concerns to Frankie, Valia, and Kelsey that very day, but I knew Mayuko-san to be an extremely reasonable person so I let my worries subside.
As such, I was correct. The issue was in the inprecision of my comment. “Morning” meant something different to her than it did to me. She was expecting me home at 7 am, and I thought morning still meant 12 pm. She was a bit worried about my safety, but she wouldn’t have been if I had said, “I’m not sure when I am coming home tomorrow, but I’ll keep you posted.”
Problem solved! Everything was good. While I was there, we talked about other random things, and something that came up was how thankful she was that I wasn’t fearful of Sei-san. Apparently, other students in the past have been unsettled by his monotone and somewhat expressionless nature. It used to create an awkward dynamic, especially in terms of spoken communication. It’s outside of Sei-san’s nature to initiate conversation, something that I’ve realized on my own, and since the past students wouldn’t initiate conversation either… well you get the picture. And while I wasn’t necessarily afraid of Sei-san, his reserved nature did get me wondering at times, so it was nice to have Mayuko-san’s clerification.
I did, however, bring up one instance where I was a bit unnerved by him. Last week, after seeing that Sei-san had a beer in front of him during dinner, I remembered how Mayuko-san had said, “If you ever want beer in the future, just get it yourself,” right after she served it to me one night. So, I did exactly that. Unfortunately, Sei-san didn’t think the same way. When I returned with a beer, he said something to the effect of, “Oh, Brandon, unfortunately we only serve beer on weekends, but tonight it’s okay.” I’m not a fool, so I put it back regardless.
When I brought up this story with Mayuko-san, she laughed. At the time, she was thinking the same thing. She thought to herself, “Wow, Brandon is so brave.” What she and I didn’t realize is that, because English is English, her usage of “get” meant something completely different to her and I. While I thought she meant “serve yourself,” she actually meant, “go buy it yourself.” Oh the joy. Between our laughter, we apologized to each other, and Mayuko-san cleared it up with Sei-san over dinner, where he monotonely acknowledged the story.
わたしは、マダファッカ！ 