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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.

Well, it only seems appropriate to finally talk about our home in Japan:

Numazu is a small city of approximately 200,000 people which is surrounded by several cities of about 100,000 - Fuji, Mishima, Gotemba and Susono. In other words, despite the fact that the Japanese think of this area as “countryside,” it has a significant population, comparable to several American cities that make it into the Biggest 100 American Metro Areas. We are located at the northeast corner of the Izu Peninsula, at the southeastern foot of Mt. Fuji, and approximately two hours by car, one hour by shinkansen east of Tokyo. Numazu station is located on the Tokaido Line and the Gotemba line, connecting the city quickly to most of the surrounding area.
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Perhaps part of the reason the people of Numazu think of their city as rural, is because it maintains relative obscurity to many Japanese. While both Mishima and Fuji, although smaller than Numazu, have shinkansen stations, Numazu does not. Additionally, there seem to be very few attractions for tourists and, as my student who happens to be a city planner explained, it is still recovering aesthetically from the poorly organized post-WWII building boom that left the city a messy cluster of concrete boxes and radio towers. There are moments of beauty, however, including Numazu’s Imperial Villa, a longtime summer home of the Imperial family, and Mt. Kanuki and it’s beautiful five-storied pagoda (shown below):

There is also a relatively famous tsunami gate, designed for reducing the damage caused by a tsunami by lowering a very large concrete block into the entrance of the port. The view from the observatory at the top of the gate gives an impressive look at Suruga bay and the area surrounding Numazu, hence it’s name “View-O”:

The port area around View-O is well-known for its exceptional seafood.

Of course, for all my talk of Numazu not being so small of a city, it still has a relatively small town feel. Most of the central city is relatively compact, with a few shopping areas on the south side of the station, including one covered pedestrian shopping street known as Nakamise. We have access to a meager selection of foreign food, and a great selection of Japanese food. There are two movie theaters close to the station that sometimes show English films, although they’re usually several months behind the United States. We buy most of our food at a grocery/everything store that is just a two or three minute walk from our house.

Overall, we are happy with our home for the next year. While we are not in the fast-moving world that is Tokyo, we’re also not in the middle of nowhere despite what our students would have us believe. This small town-city mix allows us to experience both rural and urban aspects of Japanese culture at the same time.

Japanese version of “The Office” from last week’s SNL. This could not be more fantastic:

In case you’re wondering - they are actually speaking Japanese and, while simplified, they are making the same jokes as the American version.

Now that I’ve finished writing about our recent travels, I’m going to start writing quick posts whenever I can about our classes, our apartment, and other aspects of our life here in Numazu. Whenever I get a little bit more time, I’ll also be writing about anything else that’s going on here that may be interesting to everyone at home.

I’m going to begin with our job: we are full time English teachers at American Language Services in Numazu. For the most part, we really like the situation that we ended up in. Although the pay is slightly lower than that of many other English teachers, we have diverse schedules and a variety of students and classes. I have basically every kind of class you can think of - from nursery students (3 years old) to high schoolers to adult business classes. You may, like we initially did, think that this sounds difficult. However, because we teach eikaiwa, or English conversation, most of the classes take relatively little preparation and tend to be quite interesting. The majority of classes are adults and most of them speak enough English to hold an interesting conversation about their weekends, which is always the first thing we ask them about. After all, people everywhere talk most easily about themselves. Additionally, many of our classes are held on-site at businesses or other locations. While this means commuting time, it’s a huge benefit to us, as we get to see the inside of Japanese factories, businesses, homes and schools on a weekly basis. While our students learn English we are getting a valuable cultural lesson.

Of course, while the job is interesting, it does have its downsides. We work approximately 22 teaching hours a week - sounds good right? Actually, including two hours we’re required to work in the office a week and hours and hours of commuting time we easily make it to a traditional 40 hours a week. The timetable, however, is far from traditional - we are supposed to be available anytime between 8 am and 9 pm every day, which we found out means that we have classes from 8 am and until 9 pm almost every day. Since doing this everyday (as we did when we first arrived) was incredibly grueling we asked for several nights off a week and now we’re not required to work Monday or Wednesday after 5:00 pm. This has been a big relief and now we’re pretty happy with our working situation.

I’ll probably go into more detail about specific classes later, but for now I’ll leave it with this short introduction. Let me know if there’s anything specific you want to read about in the comments.

Sorry for not finishing this more quickly, but we had a busy weekend and I’ve been busily trying to plan our trip to China in August this week.

So, on our last day in Kyoto, we headed to Nijo castle for a little break from temple viewing. Nijo castle was built by Tokugawa Ieyasu, the founder of the Tokugawa shogunate, as the Kyoto residence of the Tokugawa clan. Although they had moved the shogunal capital to Edo (Tokyo), the Imperial family remained in Kyoto, necessitating frequent visits by the shogun to the old capital.

The castle has an outer moat and wall and an inner moat and wall, making it one of the more impressively defended castles I’ve ever seen:

Inside of the fortifications are two separate palaces: the Ninomaru palace and the Honmaru palace. While I’m not exactly sure what the Honmaru palace was used for, the Ninomaru palace was used as the private quarters of the shogun while he was in Kyoto and so it has a number of anti-assassin architectural features, including hidden doors and its nightingale floors which squeak as you walk on them. Also, like most castles, Nijo has several beautiful gardens on its premises:

After finishing at the castle, Anna and I decided to split up, as she had had enough of temples during our trip and wanted to go shopping instead. I headed for Kinkaku-ji, one of the most famous temples in Japan, and Ryoan-ji, famous for its Zen rock garden. I’ll spare everyone the history of these temples, as they are primarily for their visual appeal. First, Kinkaku-ji, the golden temple:

And Ryoan-ji, home to one of the most famous rock gardens in the world:

As you might be able to tell from the picture, the rock garden is a good example of one of those famous attractions that really fails to impress in person. There were swarms of people sitting around it, talking and making noise and I was reminded of seeing the Mona Lisa, behind glass and smaller than I expected.

Because of the crazy crowds during Golden Week, it took me nearly three hours to get through these two temples, after which I met back up with Anna and we decided to head home. Of course, we couldn’t escape the crowds even on the shinkansen, as we hadn’t been able to get reserved seats. We ended up standing in a smoking car for almost two hours in order to get home. As bad as it sounds, we were lucky, since we left tens of people at every stop after Kyoto unable to squeeze onto the train at all.

There’s not much more to be said about Nara - the primary attraction is obviously Todaiji and its daibutsu. There is also a very large five-storied pagoda in the temple complex of Kofuku-ji with a peaceful little pond behind it:

And, of course, no trip to Nara would be complete without feeding the free-roaming deer in Nara’s public park:

Unfortunately, exactly as the guidebook predicted, we saw several western tourists munching on the deer biscuits as they walked around Nara.

The trip from Nara to Kyoto was the shortest of our trip - less than an hour on the local train. As we stepped off the train, we were greeted by our first real taste of how crowded Japan can be. The station was one of the bigger and busier train stations I’ve ever been to, and I’m sure that Golden Week didn’t help. Moreover, the modern design of the train station and the ugly Kyoto hotel tower across the street immediately took away any lingering thoughts that Kyoto would be that picture-perfect, traditional Japan that is shown nostalgically in television or movies :

As we walked through the station, I was reminded of the first time I walked into the gigantic and similarly modern train station in Rome with its large shopping mall, finding it hard to believe that it was the central hub of the city that was home to much of western culture. Kyoto, the largest remaining bastion of Japanese culture, seemed decidedly uncultured.

Of course, Kyoto maintains its importance in Japan for a reason, and after checking into our hotel, we quickly found out why. Although they are scattered around the city, some of the most impressive, famous, and historically significant temples in Japan are located in Kyoto. After checking into our hotel, we decided to head to two of the most famous first, hoping to escape the crowds after visiting them.

Our first stop was Sanjusangendo, home to 1001 images of the 1000 armed Kannon (Sk. Avalokite?vara). These 1001 statues and the 28 guardian myoo, ten, ashura and other deities are located within 33 separate sections of the temple, hence the name Sanjusangendo, or “33 Bay Hall.” This number 33 is a sacred number in Buddhism, and represents the number of forms Kannon can appear in to teach the path to enlightenment. We weren’t allowed to take pictures and they would’ve have included lots of people’s heads anyways, so here are some pictures that I retrieved from this website:

The rows and rows of statues were really impressive and illustrate well the developing importance of Kannon and his pure land during the medieval period in which these images were made.

Next on the list was Kiyomizu-dera, definitely on the list of the top-three most famous temples in Japan. Unfortunately for us, this meant that the temple was literally overflowing with people standing shoulder-to-shoulder to get a chance to pray at the altar or drink the sacred water from the waterfall. I still got some nice pictures, however, as it’s a pretty large complex:

We waited in line nearly 20 minutes to get a drink from one of the three sacred water spouts you can see above and for which the temple gets its name. It was cold and tasted good, but I’m not sure it granted the health, longevity or success that is promised.

Because of the large crowds both in the temples and on the buses to and from the temples, we spent nearly 4 hours just seeing these two temples. We decided to have a look at the traditionally maintained streets of Gion, hoping to see a geisha or maiko (geisha’s apprentice), and then head back towards the station for some food. Unfortunately we saw no geisha but the streets were very beautiful:

By the time we finally made it home, we were exhausted and decided to call it a night so that we could wake up early and start again the next day. I’ll finish with Kyoto and this trip in the next post.

The next morning, we woke up at 6:00 so that we could attend Kumagaiji’s Buddhist ceremony at 6:30. It was an interesting experience - as we entered we were given some incense to rub on our hands and a shawl reading “Koyasan” to wear around our necks. Then, we took seats among the other people who had stayed the night at the temple, several of them still wearing their pajamas. The ceremony began with chanting and a series of ritual motions in front of the altar, conducted by the head priest. At the very center of the altar was a miniature version of Konpon Daito, a two-storied pagoda in Koyasan that we would see later that morning. It is considered the center of the lotus flower created by the eight mountains surrounding Koyasan and is thus the sacred center of Shingon’s most sacred site:

The second part of the ceremony was a sermon, given in Japanese of course, by the head priest. While I certainly didn’t understand complexities of the sermon, I do know that he discussed religious beliefs all over the world, religion in Japan (or its supposed lack there-of), and the failure of some major temples in Japan in fulfilling their social purpose. He seemed particularly unhappy with Tokyo’s Sensoji. Of course, he finished with a sales pitch for Shingon including recommending a video on Kukai’s life. After the sermon, we stood in the footprints of the Buddha and walked around the altar before returning to our rooms where we were served breakfast of miso soup and rice.

After saying goodbye to our hosts at Kumagaiji (and paying them the $100 per person they charged for hosting us) we headed out to do some final sightseeing in Koyasan. Notable sights included Konpon Daito (shown above) and Kongobuji (Shingon’s main temple) which had several beautiful gardens:

After stopping by the Tokugawa memorial where both Tokugawa Ieyasu and Tokugawa Hidetada are enshrined, we got back on the cablecar down the mountain and headed for Nara:

Nara is about 50 km away from Koyasan, but because of the windy mountain tracks and frequent stops, the trip took nearly three hours. After arriving in Nara, we immediately joined the crowds and headed to Todaiji, the largest wooden building in the world, and home to Nara’s daibutsu - the largest Buddha statue in Japan. The statue represents Dainichi Nyorai (Sk. Vairocana), the eternal manifestation of Gautama Buddha in the Lotus Sutra and the incarnation of the dharmakaya. It was impressive, to say the least, but the throngs of Golden Week tourists took away some of the atmosphere that must usually exist in Todaiji. Todaiji and the daibutsu:

At the back of Todaiji is a large pillar with a hole through it, which is said to be exactly the same size as one of the daibutsu’s nostrils. On a less busy day, anyone might be seen squeezing through the hole, as climbing through it guarantees enlightenment. However, since it was Golden Week only children were climbing through it and the line was ridiculously long: