It’s been a pretty full weekend for me once again. Since Wednesday, I went to the second concert on Thursday (which rocked), went to Aomori with Hwang and Paku, did CPR training with my club, went out for karaoke and finally, on Sunday, spent the entire day with my new host family. Well, let’s get into then, shall we?
Thursday was the second concert that was being put on by Yasu and his Light Music Company club. This time, however, Yasu would be playing with his band, Dead Stock, whom you saw video of previously on this blog. They kind of have a sound along the lines of Green Day or Sublime and I really enjoyed seeing them play that one time, so I was really looking forward to it. The concert was to start at 6:00 P.M., half an hour after my last class of the day (Japanese Music, coincidentally enough). I’d talked to Joline about coming along with me that night, to which she agreed. We both take that music class, so it was easy enough to get some quick dinner before heading to the show, right next door to the cafeteria.
The first two bands were OK, being cover acts of some popular Japanese rock groups. But they were certainly playing as the opening acts for Dead Stock and the subsequent band, Needle Bath. I was talking to Yasu before the show and he commented on how they hadn’t had much rehearsal time lately. Once they started into their first song, I couldn’t tell. I hadn’t had that much fun at a concert in a long time, especially considering it was a free show put on by student bands. There is some real musical talent here at Hirosaki University. Joline retreated to the back of the room because I dove right in and started moshing with the other guys up front. Finally, on the last song by Yasu’s group, one student (who was quite the energetic guy) came up next to me, looked at me and pointed up. They wanted me to go crowd surfing.
“Sou ka?“
I was lifted up by what must have been the entire group of moshers up front. Here I was, this big, goofy gaijin being paraded around the room to the sounds of my friend’s band. I whooped and yelled the whole time (it also happened to be the first time I ever crowd surfed). It was a moment from Japan that I won’t ever forget.
Friday I had made plans to go with Hwang and Paku down to Aomori, the biggest city in Aomori prefecture, the same prefecture that Hirosaki is in. The reason for this was that we wanted to get our visas modified so that we could get part-time jobs. A student visa doesn’t allow a person to work, but it’s a fairly simple process to get this changed. Around 2 P.M., I met with Hwang out in front of the cafeteria, after which we pedaled to the nearby Maruesu supermarket. It would be there that we would meet Paku because he was still back at the Kaikan. After we all met up, we made our way to the train station. I must have spent the entire first leg of the trip to Aomori talking with Paku about Japanese grammar.
It was my first time inside the station, which operated in a manner very similar to that of a subway station in a big city in the U.S.. You purchased your ticket at a machine just outside the gates, after which you headed down to your platform. When we got there, the train for Aomori was siting there waiting for us. The ride took about an hour, with frequent stops at different stations along the way. The scenery was a mixture of rural towns and some countryside. The interior of the train was also very similar to that of a subway, with seats lining the walls and handles dangling from the ceilings for standing passengers.
The view from the front of Aomori Eki
The first thing we did after getting into Aomori was head over to the visitor information center, who gave us the directions to get to the Aomori regional immigration office, where we would be submitting our paperwork for the visa change. We had about one hour before closing, but it was only a 15 minute walk from where we were. We started making our way down the streets of Aomori.
My first impressions of the place was that it was clearly larger than Hirosaki and had more of a “big city” feel about it. The two cities are actually quite close in size according to Wikipedia, only about 30,000 people apart in population, but this was my first time spending any amount of time in a city in Japan other that Hirosaki, so I might have been looking at things through rose-tinted glasses.
When we first showed up at the office, we were in for a bit of a surprise - the office actually stopped taking applications for visa exceptions at four, which was half an hour ago! But the clerks had a bit of conversation amongst themselves and said it’d be OK. It only took about ten minutes all told, after which I received a piece of stamped paper that said I could work a part-time job up to 14 hours a week.
After going to the office, we stopped by at the nearby Aoi Mori (blue forest) park, a small park in the middle of the city. It couldn’t have been bigger than two or three blocks across, making it significantly smaller than Hirosaki park, which is host several million people every year during the cherry blossom season. But it was a quaint place with a nice fountain out in front, where we took the above picture. Afterwards, we made our way back to the train and then back home.
That evening on the way home from the train station we ran into Lim and Anyeong, who were going out to the Beny Mart to pick up some food. I asked if I could come along, to which I got an affirmative. I spent my time shopping for okonomiyaki ingredients, since I had some made by Lim a few days before and it was really delicious. But mainly, I was getting sick of curry almost every single day in my room. I bought some flour, cabbage, onion, negi onion and okonomiyaki sauce. I already had the katsuobushi and eggs back in my room, so with those items we were ready to do up some okonomiyaki.
I went between learning how to make the dish with Lim and entertaining Anyeong, for whom it was the first time she had been in my room. The first thing she noticed was my MacBook because she said that she wanted to get a Mac at some point. Being the big geek that I am, I was only too happy to show off some of OS X 10.5 Leopard’s features to her. She seemed to be very impressed. In the course of showing her Front Row, I stumbled onto the folder full of the videos I have uploaded to YouTube thus far, so we watched a few of those together.
Soon enough, the okonomiyaki was finished and we all ate together. After adding the garnishes of katsuobushi, mayonnaise and okonomiyaki sauce it tasted just divine. I hope that after that night I’ll be able to try and make it on my own. It’s really good stuff!
The following day, Saturday, I woke up and almost immediately got an email from Ise, one of the senior members of the Adventure club, or Tanken-bu. He said that there was going to be a training session going on at school and wanted to know if I would go. I emailed him back that I would and hurried out the door, since it would be starting in about 15 minutes! I quickly pedaled to school to find Ise waving me down along the road adjacent to the school.
The session was being put on by an emergency medial technician with the Hirosaki Fire Department. The big things that we would be learning about was CPR and the use of a defibrillator called an AED. All told, we were there for three hours. The guy in charge only had one training dummy and AED with him, so it took a long time to give everyone to a chance to practice.
That night I promised some of the Thai students, Elle and Boi, that I would go out to karaoke with them. Around 9 at night, I made my way over to Shimoda Heights to meet up. Before we left, we enjoyed a few beers with Ghan, who had come over from his place to hang out for a bit. Around 10:30, we made our way over to King Kong, just about 10 minutes from Shimoda. I’d heard about King Kong before and how it was a nice place, but this would be my first time going there. I have to say that I was impressed. It was busy when we got there, but once we got into the room, there was a nice big HDTV and thousands upon thousands of songs to pick from. I started out with some Pixies, of course, and then moved on to some more classic American songs, like “Pianoman” by Billy Joel to introduce the non-Americans in the room to some of my country’s music. Hojin came along too and he was really good at karaoke, probably the strongest singer of all of us in the room. He kept singing these different Korean pop songs and was doing a really great job of it. We ended up staying out until almost 3 A.M., after which I had to take my leave because I would be meeting my host family for the first time the following morning at 11.
I suppose I’ll give a bit of background on how I got a host family and what they are supposed to be, since I haven’t done that yet here. The first week I got here, I received a pile of papers, including a form to fill out to apply for a host family. I did that in the second week or so and got notification around the end of April that I had been paired with a host family and specifically I was given the name of my host mother, Mikami-san. Now, this isn’t a family that I will be living with or anything. They have the program in place as a means to get out into the community and share Japanese culture with local families. I first contacted my host mother the same day I got notification and found out that the soonest we could first meet would be May 18th, which was Sunday.
So, how did it go then? Around 11 A.M., I was waiting outside the front of the Kaikan for my host family to pick me up. They pulled up a short time later in a large mini-van, comparable in size to the ones found in the U.S.. The family seemed really pleasant and the mother in particular was a very affable person. There are two generations living together in the same house: a grandmother and grandfather, the father and mother and two school-aged daughters. The grandfather was driving and we had a bit of a get to know you type discussion and about what we would be doing that day. Mikami-san’s English was fairly good, as well as Saaya, the older of the two daughters. Both of the daughters (the other’s name is Rina) go to the same private junior/high school where they have native English speakers working as teachers. In addition to the family, there was a Chinese girl named Daani who was along with us. As I would find out later, she was on a two week trip to Japan on a program of some sort. Today she and I would be experience being with a Japanese family for the first time together.
The first thing we did was go out for lunch at this traditional Japanese-style restaurant. The lobby of the place was dominated by a large fish tank and many tubs containing all varieties of sea creatures. We were soon seated at a table in a room sectioned off by a sliding paper door, with the table being a hybrid Eastern/Western style. You sat on the floor, but the area under the table was lowered so you could let your legs hang down if you chose to. For the food, we all had the same lunch set, with some fish and rice, tempura, cabbage and miso soup. We had all manner of discussion, mainly finding out more about the family’s life, the daughters’ school, my home town and the like. I found out that we would be next going to an elementary school, the same one that the daughters had attended in fact, to see Sports Day. Sports Day is a kind of day when the school holds track-and-field style athletic competitions and virtually every elementary school in Japan participates around the same time.
Those are koi-noburi, a kind of charm that are strung up wherever there are young children, as a way to help them grow up healthy and strong.
The field out in front of the school was crowded with all the kids and parents cheering them on. There was stirring orchestral music blaring from the loudspeakers and an announcer giving a play-by-play of the proceedings. Mikami-san lead us over to meet the principle who afterwards invited us to check out the school. It would be my first time inside a Japanese school (besides Hirosaki University, of course), so I was only too happy to check it out. Like many other places in Japan, you had to remove your shoes before entering. All the students are assigned lockers where they keep their indoor shoes, but we had to borrow some lockers that had some (really small) slippers for us to wear while walking around inside. First thing up was the gymnasium. I learned from Mikami-san that the place was a fairly new building, and it showed. The gym was huge, with a stage at one end. Outside, in what appeared to be a courtyard of sorts created by the wings of the building, was a playground covered with artificial turf.
From left-to-right: Rina, Saaya and Mikami-san in the elementary school
The classrooms were set up according to grade, with all the 1st grade classrooms in the same section of the building, all the 2nd grade, etc.. The school taught students up to the 6th grade level. The whole place was neat and clean and all of the classrooms were arraigned in a similar fashion: the desks facing the front, a teacher’s desk and the blackboard. The walls of the hallways were adorned with students work in writing, art, math and the like. Since I’ve been contemplating spending some time teaching English in Japan after graduation, it was really great to finally see what a Japanese school looks like in person. I’m not the only one, either, as most of the English-speaking ryuugakusei want to do the JET program upon finishing college.
We finished up at the school and made our way back to the car. Next, we would be heading back to the Mikami’s home. It would be another first for me, to be visiting a Japanese family’s home. The trip back to their house was quite short, they only lived about five minutes away by car.
The home was two stories, with the grandmother and grandfather taking the first floor and the rest of the family on the second story. The stairs directly adjacent the door were steep and narrow and adorned with various pictures and wooden crafts. Upon stepping up to the second floor, I was greeted with a living room with a couch and a low wooden table in the middle of the room. I got a tour of Saaya’s room, on the opposite side of the living room. She was showing me all these different pieces of memorabilia of a particular favorite band and Japanese versions of the Harry Potter books and Pirates of the Caribbean.
We had some grapefruit-flavored soda water and some cookies while watching a popular Japanese drama called Rookies, about a baseball team of misfit boys. We were like this for a little while until Mikami-san invited me and Daani to come into the kitchen to help her prepare curry. We cut up some potatoes, carrots and onions, after which we added them to a pot and started to boil them. It was my first time making curry not by hand, but it wasn’t 100% homemade since we would be using a a pre-made sort of roux that can be bought from supermarkets.
After the curry preparations, we decided to head out to Sakurano for a bit, the nearby department store which also happened to be the biggest in Hirosaki. I’d been there once before, but this would be my first time actually going around looking at things. Earlier, Saaya had been showing me photos from print club, so she was excited to do that the arcade in Sakurano. Print club, for the uninitiated, is the Japanese version of a photo booth, so you know what that means: super high-tech and flashy. We walked into a large machine with enough room for four or five people to stand comfortably and a touch screen console on the right side. We took a few photos, maybe six or so. Afterwards, you had the option of editing the photos at another touch screen with these large pen-type things. You could write messages or add in little pre-made cutesy pictures like kittens and hearts to go over the photos. You even had the option of the photos sent as email attachments to your phone! The whole thing seemed pretty girly, but I could see how couples can have fun with it. Here’s some video of it in action:
After Sakurano, we headed back to the Mikami’s home to have some curry. We ate while watching the news and chatting about what was going on. I remember in particular the news was talking about an unexploded bomb that was found, presumably dropped by the U.S. during World War II. Later, after the meal, the grandparents came upstairs to join us and have some dessert of mochi and sweet potato.
So ended another great week here in Japan! This week, I’ll be heading out into town to watch Yasu perform with some friends at the Hirosaki MAG-NET, a local club, as well as meeting my host family again on Sunday. The daughters will be getting their photos taken while in kimono, it should be quite the experience for them!
また、ね！
