香嵐渓の紅葉

In the spring Japanese people gather to appreciate sakura (cherry blossom) trees in the short few weeks between when the flowers bloom and fall. Six months later they go around to look at kōyō, the red leaves of trees in fall. (In Japanese this is written, sensibly, with the kanji 紅 'red' and 葉 'leaves'.) These are two times of the year when many Japanese people make the time to go out with their family & friends and appreciate the passing of the seasons. This tradition of watching sakura blossoms and fall leaves also reflects an important part of Japanese aesthetics -- appreciating the fleetingness of life and nature.

Recently I went to a place called Kōrankei (香嵐渓) about an hour away from my town. It's famous for its kōyō so it gets mobbed with visitors in the fall. I went with a few friends on a drizzly Monday, so it wasn't so crowded. Here are some photos.

In one part of the park there was out of nowhere an older Japanese guy in a tent surrounded by eight (8) synthesizers playing some new age-y music to suit the scenery. I wanted to ask him why 2 or 4 synths wouldn't have sufficed, but he was pretty focused on his music.

The other day I was at a video rental store with my friend and we noticed there was a guy in line wearing a very similar outfit as me. I'm on the left:

Here's a nice song from 1977 by Hiromi Ōta (太田裕美). It's called しあわせ未満.

It's gotten chilly here but after the subzero temperatures and snow last winter, I'm very happy to be in Aichi and not Hokkaido. My semester ends next Friday. I had a good first semester here and am looking forward to a few more. I can feel that my Japanese has improved in the few months I've been here so I'm looking forward to seeing where it will go (I still have a long ways).

Winter break is a few weeks long, so I'm using that time and a bunch of frequent flyer miles to romp around Taiwan and southeast Asia. In Taiwan I'll be with my classmate Setsu who is from Taipei. In Vietnam I'll be trying to meet up with a good friend from university before heading to Angkor Wat and Thailand. It will be nice to mix it up a bit and see something new.

十一月の上旬

Obama's victory speech live on Japanese tv

I watched Mitt Romney concede the election live on TV around 3 p.m. this Wednesday while in the waiting room of a Japanese hospital.

I had come in the previous day for a routine health check-up required for my visa change and was back to get the results. When I saw the doctor, he asked where I was from and when I told him, he of course brought up the election. That was in Japanese, although luckily his English medical vocabulary sufficed to tell me that my triglyceride levels are alright.

I've now had two birthdays outside of the US (Argentina for no.21, Hokkaido for no.23) but both times I had some friends around to celebrate with. Something felt much stranger about being abroad during a presidential election. There are other American students at my school, and I talked about the election a bit with them, but it was strange not feeling that communal patriotic buzz, however artificial or fleeting it is.

looking out on suburban Okazaki

On the broadcast here both the candidates' speeches were simultaneously-translated by a Japanese woman. Instead of muting out Romney or Obama, the translator's voice was simply added on top, producing a weird meshing together of the two languages. You can actually make your brain focus on one language or the other, like one of those trick images which you can look at in two ways. But if you zone out it just becomes a garble. It's not to say that my cultural identity feels equally jumbled, but it's a slippery slope in that direction.

Fluency in Japanese is still a ways off, but living here and studying the language full time it inevitably starts to seep in in strange ways. It is an objectively odd thing to find yourself or others speaking Japanese in some of your dreams at night, and weirder still when some nights dream-you knows that it's Japanese but can't comprehend it (even though it's your own brain producing it).

The grocery store near my dorm only plays muzak, some of which I recognize and some of which I don't. Recently while shopping I've heard muzak versions of that annoying Paul McCartney song "Wonderful Christmastime" and the somewhat less annoying Wham! song "Last Christmas". Sometimes I'll find myself singing along, only to look around and realize I'm probably the only one who knows the words.

shot of Mt. Fuji taken during my flight from
Tokyo to Nagoya last month

As I go into my second year here, it continues to feel natural in a way that I felt in my gut the first time I visited but that I didn't know whether would hold up in the longer term. For the time being Japan is where I live and America is where I visit. If the point of this blog originally was to record my out-of-the-ordinary experiences during my first year here, the line starts to blur as I'm here longer and my sense of 'ordinary' adjusts accordingly. My year on JET came prepackaged with its own timeline and narrative; from here on out it's unplotted and untitled (無題). Objectively what I'm doing is strange and maybe interesting, but to me it's still just what I do when I wake up in the morning.

Updates to come -- just not as often. Til next time. ✌