It’s been a while since I wrote an actual post here, so I figured I’d let you all know how my Christmas/New Year’s break went. Honestly, I didn’t do a whole lot, especially in terms of travel – I stayed in Hirosaki the whole time and didn’t do anything particularly out of the ordinary. But I did do a few things that could be considered above average and/or “cultural experiences” and I’d love to share those with you now!

The first few days of the break were spent with my club. First, I had a meeting as usual on the Thursday before the break started. It was a bit boring as I sometimes find due to the huge amount of ceremony that is done. The meetings are conducted the same way every time, with Ise (the club leader) saying a short opening, then reviewing past and future trips. This easily takes the most amount of time, as every trip has a detailed plan written out. Not only are the plans for future trips read in their loquacious entirety from front-to-back, but trips that have been done and whose plans were already read are read again, just in case any updates were made to how things were conducted. People always have plenty of questions about the minutiae of what happened. It is at this point that I feel like falling asleep, since Thursdays are one of my busiest days, with classes all day right up until the meeting.

However, this night was better because afterwards we decided to head out to Konnamura and do some nomihodai/food action. In true Japanese club fashion, the drinks were consumed with vigor, which I certainly regretted since I had class the next morning. But, this is the way things go when you are a student at a Japanese university and I relish every chance I get to have conversations with other Japanese. I can tell you, going into my final weeks and months here, that even if you are in Japan, finding opportunities to speak to Japanese people and to break into the social scene is quite difficult. This can be for a variety of reasons, whether it be shyness or Japanese level ability, but the fact is almost everyone I know, even the very skilled Chinese and Korean students, often can be heard complaining about this same thing. There’s only a couple people I know who spend more time with Japanese people than foreigners. Basically, when you’re coming here, be aware that it can be a challenge to meet Japanese people, but it is by no means impossible. I can name four or five Japanese people now that I consider more than acquaintances, and one or two who are actually becoming good friends. Then of course I have everyone in my club I can talk to when I’m with them, hence why I went to Thursday’s drinking party.

So, the next day I had work as usual at 5, but the next day was going to be special since my co-workers and I would be preparing for the Christmas party that would be held on Sunday afternoon. We spent the better part of three hours going over what the different parts of the party would be, the different events, skits, games, etc., in addition to logistics like food and drink. I, being the only male foreigner currently employed, would of course be Santa Claus. Not that I had any objection to this, I was quite looking forward to playing the part. They had a Santa suit that they’ve been using for several years now and it luckily fit me just fine. The big day of the party came on Sunday and I was feeling a bit nervous, but that all dissipated once the students started coming through the door and I started in on my “Ho Ho Ho”s. Honestly, the party was quite fun. During the course of events, the different classes of students would come up on stage and participate in a small activity not unlike the ones we do in class, if only to confirm to the parents that their kids were, in fact, learning something. In case you missed it, here’s my photo I uploaded to TwitPic of me being Santa.

Afterwards, I went out with my co-workers and boss for some well-earned dinner together at the nearby Italian, during which I had a long conversation with Britney. Britney is one of the Americans here, from Tennessee. Somehow we got on the topic and ended up talking about each others’ childhood in some depth. Of course, while all this was going on I got to indulge myself in some delicious Italian, which I hadn’t eaten since I arrived in Japan. I enjoyed it thoroughly.

So that was my Sunday of that week. The following day was my first true day of break, which went by without incident. I found that I half the break was spent in solitary confinement in my room, studying all day, while the other half I was out doing just the opposite: partying or something into the wee hours of the morning. I found that I enjoyed this greatly, as I like being with people just as much as I enjoy an entire day alone studying with only an email or two to the outside world. At this point, Japanese is becoming a serious hobby/passion, so I have no trouble just spending my time doing this.

Anyway, the following day was my club’s End of the Year party, which is called 忘年会 in Japanese. They have these parties in some capacity in clubs, work, or other extra-familial organizations. The characters in that word translate out to “forget the year party,” and you can bet that’s what a lot of people were working on. My club had its party at Hana Yori Dango, which is proving to be quite the popular place to go to have a gathering in Nishi-hiro (the cheap student bar district). We had a bunch of nabe (a kind of Japanese stew) along with various other side-dishes, and of course lots and lots o’ beer. For myself, at least – I found that myself, Ise the club leader and only a few others were beer people. I chatted, I ate, I drank for all of three hours, after which we headed to the traditional second party at another bar for another three hours. Again, we did another round of drinking. All in all, it was a very unique chance to get a look into something that is otherwise reserved almost exclusively for other Japanese people. I was the only white guy I saw the whole night and I was glad for it. Later in the night after the second party, me and several of my club mates walked back with my to my room, including Ise. We just happened to have the party at a bar near by the International House here. I showed the guys around my room, which is to say I opened the door and they looked in, but I had a good time pointing out the various things from America and my materials from school. They were particularly infatuated with my kanjiposter.com poster of kanji (go figure), which has all 2042 Joyo kanji and is an ever-present reminder of the daunting task ahead of me to attain Japanese literacy.

After a night like that, it can only be assumed that I needed a day or two to recover. Honestly, I wasn’t in bad shape that next day. On Christmas Eve, I headed out to the local church with my host family to enjoy a mass of mainly music. Going to church on or around Christmas is probably a tradition a lot of us westerners have, as we try to justify to ourselves Christmas being about more than just rampant consumerism and an opportunity to get drunk with relatives. The church itself was nice, being very similar in style to that of an American church. They had hand bells and singing. The song booklet they handed out had all of the lyrics in hiragana, so I was able to sing along (I just tried to treat it like karaoke). While there, we ran into Nick, my host sisters’ English teacher at their high school. I find it uncanny how often I run into him. He really is a cool guy, who gave me quite a bit of advice about teaching in Japan back at the beginning of the semester. After we left the church, my host family and I headed over the the restaurant across the street which can be humorously translated as “Surprised Ass.”

The following day rolled around and all of a sudden it was Christmas day. Usually an auspicious day, it went by without almost anything of note happening for me. I studied just as normal during the afternoon, after which I hooked up with Kevin and headed out to the local ramen place. Christmas in Japan does not really bear any special weight – it appears as an excuse to me to take part in the holiday spirit enjoyed by us in the west, but only extends as far as that. Since there are no serious social or cultural underpinnings, Christmas comes and goes and just any other day. Every restaurant and bar I saw along the street was open and I saw all kinds of people out and about as they normally would.

After we enjoyed some ramen, Kevin and I hooked up with Alex and Luis and headed over the Hana Yori Dango (notice a trend?) for some Christmas day merrymaking. We drank beers for a few hours, chatted with pair of women at the table next to us and generally lamented the fact that this day was just so ordinary. However, things turned for the better for me after we left the bar and headed for our respective homes. I was able to speak with my family back home in Maine over Skype complete with video on their Christmas morning. How utterly cool technology is sometimes! They set up the computer in the living room by the tree, so I could see everything and talk to everyone just like I was there in the flesh. I was able to talk with my grandparents, aunts, uncles, mom, dad, brothers and all the rest. :) Seeing the living room like that in real time made me realize that I would be there sooner than I thought, and I am most certainly looking forward to coming home.

The following day went by without much incident again, I spent it mainly studying. I did get an email from Alex, however, asking me if I wanted to go out to the ice rink up in Aomori with him and a friend of his named Sasha. Sasha is actually a Japanese student who will be going to my school starting in the spring of 2010 I believe. She came by the International Center one day a few weeks ago and asked me a bunch of questions about Maine, which I answered with some of the most butchered Japanese to come out of my mouth, as I recall. Anyway, Sasha shuttled the three of us up there to the rink in the middle of a snow storm, but we managed to make it there in one piece. The ice rink had two skating areas: an inner ice hockey rink, which was surrounded by another circle of ice like so many rings around Saturn. It was on this so-called “high speed” ice track that we spent most of our time. I hadn’t skated in a long time , and as such I was quite rough in the beginning. It started to come back to me bit by bit, though, and by the end of the day I was able to skate, turn, and hockey stop without much trouble. Alex clearly had been skating a few times before, as he was able to flip around and skate backwards at high speed, whereas Sasha was quite the beginner. I asked her about skating and she told me that she went about once a year. Overall, this was a fun activity, which I especially enjoyed because it nicely broke the cycle of study-drink-study. That wasn’t to last, though, as we organized for some drinking that night Alex, Sasha, JJ, Kevin and myself. It was quite the wild night, to say the least. Let’s just say I was feeling a little rough for the next couple days after this.

I was able to alleviate this a bit the day after next when I randomly ran into some of the foreign students at the supermarket while doing my evening shopping. I was told my O (a Thai student, and yes her name is pronounced as simply “O.”) that they were going to her host family’s house. They invited me along, and while at first I was a bit apprehensive, I decided to come along nonetheless. I didn’t know what I had in store for myself that night, but it turned out to be one of such a wholesome and truly “foreign exchange” nature that I was totally taken aback. I was introduced to a house of such beautiful, northern Japanese style, owned by a single obaachan (Japanese for a kindly older woman) who has taught calligraphy the world over and whose works adorned the walls. The house was lively, full to the brim with other foreign students, and as I came to find out the woman who owned this house loved to get us together and have dinner. I also was reintroduced to a Chinese friend from last semester that I hadn’t seen in a long time, Kome. I sat in in the warm room made of wood and tatami with the snow falling outside, drinking in the company of people who couldn’t speak English while making gyoza together. There was something so peculiar about that night, something about the atmosphere that just left me drunk with contentment and joy to be with my fellow man. I’d feel lucky if I’m ever able to recreate the experience of that night again in my life. We ate and drank until almost 11 that evening, after which we said our goodbyes and headed back out into the cold, clear night.

There are still two more things left to mention, the first being the New Year. So, how did I spend my New Year? Well, it was first of all quite impossible to get together with any of my Japanese friends. It would akin to trying to barge in on a family on Christmas morning – New Years is first and foremost a family holiday, so practically everyone had headed “home for the holidays,” as they say. Hirosaki was a veritable ghost town in the evening when I finally headed out to see what everyone was up to. It ended up being that quite a few of the other American guys were busy with their own things, including going out to clubs, being with their parents who’d come to visit, be with girlfriends, etc.. I found company with the reliable crew that I had shared an evening with already – Kevin and Luis, who were as well a bit frustrated by the fact that no one was around to get together with. However, we managed to make our own fun that night. We drank a bit in Luis’s room, played his new electric guitar, then headed out to seemingly the only place open nearby: Konnamura, the bar where I had spent many a fun evening. We ordered up a few plates of food, including their ridiculously large fried chicken platter and chatted for a long while. We went around 11, so as soon as it was getting close to midnight, Luis set his cell phone alarm to beep when we got down to the final minute. When it came, we all stood, drinks in hand (in my case it was a green tea, I wasn’t drinking) and did the traditional countdown. We weren’t alone as it turned out. There were two other large parties of people eating and drinking, and as the clock struck midnight we all erupted in cheers. One of the groups actually brought along party favors and covered the floor in confetti. After a while, we decided it would be a good idea to head out and do the traditional Japanese thing on New Years: going to the temple and pray for a happy new year.

We ended up walking to the 5-storied pagoda, which was the subject of one my first videos when I got here. The place was nothing like it looked like in that video, however. It was fully lit-up and reminded me at once of the Hanami festival. The vendors were open, the booming gong that could be heard for a long distance and the outright liveliness of hundreds of people descending on a small Hirosaki temple. They had the shrine all done up nice with a large cloth and writing on covering the opening to the main temple itself. It was here that everyone was tossing their money, ringing the bell, clapping twice and praying. Of course, I just had to take part in it myself and Kevin happily joined, along with a couple other friends I didn’t intend on running into. It turned out that a bunch of my Korean pals had headed to the temple to take part in the festivities. We all got in line to pray. When we got up there, I saw that they had a large box covering the stairs that normally led up to the interior of the temple, but was currently being used as a place to toss money into. Kevin, Park and I tossed our money in, and while I manned the small gong in the middle, the other two shook the bells hanging from rope from the ceiling. All together we clapped twice and prayed for a second, each of us probably praying the same thing: “let this be a good year.” I have every confidence that it will, since I will hopefully be finishing up the majority of studies at college and will be graduating sometime next year. After that, well, we’ll see what happens, but I know that one way or another I will be back here in Japan.

On the way out of the temple, Kevin and I ran into a pair of Japanese women and a young boy. This motley crew ended up being the evening’s entertainment. Kevin and I were standing just behind them in front of a stall selling the fortune papers that you tie to the string. The shorter one of the pair of women took a look back, and said in an unusually loud voice “are they gaiijin?” This came out as heavily slurred Japanese. At once, I realized this person wasn’t being rude, they were just being drunk. It is very unlike Japanese people to out and out say, “Oh look! White people!” I find that if they do take notice of you, they either say nothing, or start a discussion about America and/or English. This even happens to some of the Eurpeans here who don’t speak English as a native language. As far as I can tell, Japanese perceptions about the west are filtered through America. Anyway, it ended up being that these two were sisters and the child was the non-drunk one’s. We got on well with the conversation, but after the drunk one started hitting on Kevin (it didn’t help that her sister was egging her on) and then proceeded to try and wipe her nose on his jacket, we decided to try and cut things short.

I had one final thing that I did during the break – I went out to a “live,” which is a kind of concert put on by bands in special “live houses” designed specifically for this purpose. But before that, I went out for some sushi with my host family, which was a totally unexpected and thoroughly enjoyed treat.

It was out at this place called “Kappa Zushi,” a kind of conveyor-belt sushi place that was out on the outskirts of Hirosaki, and as such I hadn’t been there before. I always appreciate sushi, considering how good it is here in Japan and how expensive it is, even if it is Japan. This place was extra neat, since it has a goddamn train deliver your sushi to your table after you order it with a freaking touchscreen. I swear, the west needs to play catch up in a couple departments:

After the sushi, I bid farewell to my host family and went over the the Mag-Net which I had not been to in some time. When I got there, Kevin and Alex were already there as they told me they would be. I was afraid that I wouldn’t arrive in time to see my friend Yasu’s band play. However, they weren’t going to be on for a while. When they did finally get on, they were great as usual. I even jumped down into the pit and moshed to their final song, “Fight with Myself” (all of their lyrics are in English, actually). I really think their music is great for a couple of guys from a small northern Japanese town and if you want to take a listen, I’ve uploaded their debut EP here. I’m sure they wouldn’t mind the exposure if this was to get big. Their music, as you may have heard in previous videos, is a punk/ska type sound, so if you are into that I think you’ll enjoy the album. The closest thing to a radio single is tracks 2 and 5, but I like them all.

After the great live, Kevin and the other allowed me to stay for the after party, or “uchiage” as they call it. The word literally means “the house gives,” and give they did. Mag-Net served up a veritable feast and a cooler full of beer. I chatted the night away with various guys who just an hour before lit up the stage. Basically, I was partying with the entire Hirosaki/Aomori indie rock scene. As is typical of Japanese parties, we weren’t done by a long shot and headed out to party number two at a bar in Kaji-machi around 3 in the morning. At this point, it was just me with the band guys (Kevin and Alex had gone home). We chilled, talked, and continued with the beer and food consumption. I also got some pictures, the one that I like the most being this one:

That’s Yasu on the bottom right, bassist and singer for DEAD STOCK.

I guess that will wrap this one up, and quite a “one” it is. This baby clocks in at over 3800 words, as long as some of my earlier posts. So, if you’ll please excuse me any grammar/spelling mistakes. I’ve run it through a spell check, but besides that I guarantee nothing. Later!

2 Responses to “Winter Break in Japan”

1. Arina says:

   January 14, 2009 at 12:57 am

   I enjoyed your story! It transmits that strange feeling that winter break gives here.

   Reply
2. Tim says:

   March 2, 2010 at 11:36 pm

   Japanese people are almost exactly opposite of Americans…
   On the surface they will be the most polite and eager people to lend assistance when you first meet them, on the contrary, most Americans aren’t polite, and would be hard pressed to give any polite greetings…
   That said, one you scrub away that first surface layer, that 99.999% of all Japanese have pasted across their faces, you would be S.O.L. if you were ever in a car accident, or needed some real help, on the other hand, Americans, once you scrub away their surface layer, you will find a warm heart and most probably somebody that would give you the shirt off their back… It won’t happen in Japan…

   Also, I don’t know how much time you actually spend here, but they have pretty much re-wrote history to fit their own victim-hood mentality… As far as they are concerned, deep down inside, they are victims of the U.S., and the Japanese never did anything wrong… And if they are faced with undeniable facts, their response will be, “Well America did it too!”

   If you can get over the racism, and are OK with the fact that, no matter how good or how much time you’ve lived here, or if you are 99.999% Japanese, with a .0001% percent foreign blood, you will never be treated as an equal…

   Believe it or not… It’s true…
   Lived here over 25 years, have seen the country and people from both perspectives….

   Reply