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While Japan is notorious for its use of sometimes cute, sometimes strange mascots for everything from pachinko parlors to entire cities, the detail of this little character that I found in one of my classrooms amazed me:

Meet Kenketsu-chan. Kenketsu means “blood drive” and chan is an affectionate honorific that would usually be used on a child or between close friends. As you can see, Kenketsu-chan has ears that are actually drops of blood, and as the poster describes, his ears (and his smile) grow the more blood that is donated. Kenketsu-chan even comes with friends, who can be seen at the top and bottom of the poster - one for each of the four blood groups. I guess it’s a strange way of promoting a blood drive, but the concept was so amusing to me that I stole one of the posters for a souvenir.

Over the past two weeks, we have been a little stressed out by some conflict we’ve been having with our boss. To be honest, the situation has been going on since we arrived here, but we finally decided that we were going to confront it about two weeks ago and we finally did on Monday. When talking to our boss - telling her what we thought was wrong and why we thought it was wrong - rather than responding to our points logically she quickly digressed to the point of tears at which point she stood up, said “I’ll have to think about it,” and walked out of the room. The next day we found out that she had been so upset that she hadn’t even realized that we were asking for something, she simply thought that we were attacking her as a manager. Even worse, she told Anna when I wasn’t even there that I had taken a bad attitude with her, acting like I was the boss and not her.

Naturally, while I am glad that we received what we asked for, I’ve been feeling dissatisfied with her misinterpretation of my intentions all week. It wasn’t until today, when I had a fascinating conversation with some of my more advanced students about a recent seminar they attended, that I realized how much of a cultural clash I had had at the beginning of the week. The seminar these students attended yesterday was an international business course, focusing on cultural differences that affect business. It was apparently taught by an American and a Canadian, both of whom are proficient in Japanese since they’ve been living in Japan for well over 10 years. Using both Japanese and English, they made fun of idiosyncrasies of both Western and Japanese business.

What really caught my attention about this seminar, was the primary separation the teachers used to compare a Japanese approach to a Western approach. Essentially, they called the Japanese approach the Confucian method, with a strong master-disciple relationship taking precedence over everything else, while they called the Western approach the Socratic method, where dialogue and discussion are more important than any formal relationships. In this way, they explained why the Japanese are much more quick to agree that a white board is black if their boss says it is, and why our students are always hesitant to tell us what they want in the classroom.

Now, I’m not saying that this distinction is either historically or philosophically sound, but it really made me realize that I had been forgetting (or ignoring) everything that I knew about Japanese culture in my understanding of our boss’s reaction earlier this week. Her cultural predispositions, particularly those that indicated to her that by expressing our unhappiness we were essentially attacking her as a person and disrespecting her as a boss, can be fit with relatively little distortion into the lessons learned by my students at yesterday’s seminars. Maybe I assumed that since she’s worked with gaijin for so long she can see the world like we do. If so, I was dead wrong. Our understanding of society, values, and in turn the entire world, is shaped by cultural trappings we begin accumulating probably before we can even speak. While some people may be able to adapt very well to other cultures, other methods of thought, and other ways of life, they’ll never escape the ones that made them who they are. Despite our boss’s experience with Westerners she still acted Japanese, and despite my knowledge of Japanese culture, I still acted American.  I guess, then, that the real purpose of studying other cultures or languages is not necessarily to ever learn to think exactly like someone else, but to be able to understand someone else’s approach through our own gaze. Of course, this means that we we’ll never really be able to escape cultural differences completely. Hopefully, it does mean that in the next few months we’ll learn to reduce such cultural “clashes” into cultural “bumps.”

Two of the most common questions we were asked by our students in our first few weeks of classes was “Can you eat Japanese food?” and “What do you eat in Japan?” The first is apparently due to the fact that most of our students think that we have absolutely no experience with Japanese culture in any form. This is reinforced every time we go out after classes with them by their amazement at our ability to use hashi (chopsticks) and their utter disbelief any time I even spit out a simple Japanese phrase, let alone something close to a complete sentence. The second question, I suspect, is out of concern for our health, since it seems hard to believe that Americans wouldn’t starve to death without eating the “very, very big” portions that we get at home.

To be honest, they might actually be right - I would always be hungry in Japan if we weren’t cooking for ourselves most of the time. While I love most Japanese food, it just doesn’t seem to fill me up. Plus, we naturally feel more comfortable eating familiar food on occasion.

We have a pretty good variety in our weekly menu. I cook anything from tacos to cajun pasta to stirfry. We’ve managed to make macaroni and cheese (not out of a box), Thai curry, and even pizza several times:

Baking is probably the most limiting aspect of what we cook at home. This is primarily because of our incredibly small kitchen and the complete lack of a stove:

The only way I pull off the pizza is by putting it into the small broiler that we have below the hotplates and cooking it for a matter of minutes. We do have a microwave that also functions as a convection oven and we’ve been told by several friends that this can be used to bake, but we haven’t actually given it a try yet. It seems like a feat anyways, considering that there’s no temperature setting at all.

Naturally, we also eat Japanese food on a regular basis. While we’ve had one or two situations in which Anna was somewhat sickened by the food (notably anytime she has to eat raw fish other than sushi rolls), we haven’t been served many meals which we couldn’t eat. On the contrary, most of the food we eat is incredibly delicious, even some things we wouldn’t expect, such as the small amount of whale (sorry Greenpeace) we tried when we first arrived. Moreover, according to most of our students, most of the strange meals you might have heard that the Japanese eat, such as dolphin or whale, are not widely popular. Of course, the one exception to that is horse sashimi (raw horse), apparently a true delicacy. I still haven’t decided whether I can bring myself to actually eat horse or if I did whether my sister would ever forgive me.

Overall, Japanese food is really delicious and our homemade American meals or a relatively good selection of ethnic food in Numazu give us a chance to get some variety in our diets. And, of course, on occasion we’re good Americans and we eat perhaps our most famous export:

I haven’t written in a while and there are a number of things I’ve been intending on writing about, but at the moment all I can think about is my incredibly swollen arm. Why is my arm swollen? This weekend, we went to Tokyo (that story later), and stayed in a cheap youth hostel. By the time we left yesterday, I had two little bites on my arm. Sometime yesterday afternoon I realized that they had gotten even more swollen and now they’ve nearly doubled the size of my arm:

At first I thought the culprit was a spider, but after talking to my Japanese boss, I found out that it was most likely a “buyo” - some kind of Japanese gnat. A quick google search revealed at least one other person that has had a similar experience, although my arm is starting to look even bigger than his ankle. Apparently, the more you get bitten by them, the less the reaction. I’m really hoping that my body figures out how to deal with this kind of bite quickly because having a puffy arm every time one of these little guys gets hungry is going to suck.