Changes in the air

As I learned firsthand when I lived here five years ago, Kyouto at this time of year is subject to two distressing meteorological phenomena, and they come pretty much one right after the other. Each leaves one in a state of general moisture, though for very different reasons. The first is the rainy season, called 梅雨、or tsuyu, for reasons entirely unknown to me. It's a special reading for these two characters, the latter of which means “rain,” which makes sense, and the former of which means “plum,” which doesn't. The best explanation I've heard for this is that tsuyu occurs around the time that the plums are beginning to ripen, which I guess sounds reasonable.

But to simply call it by the innocuous title of “rainy season” understates the severity of the condition. It's not quite monsoon level, at least not in most of the country, but the sheer amount of water that falls from the sky is still prodigious. All able-bodied persons are required to keep an umbrella within reach at all times, including while sleeping or showering. In my high school days I was once caught without one for my morning commute, and spent the entire day dripping. The skies are a constant Gibsonian grey, prepared to disgorge their entire contents at a moment's notice.

The rain's enthusiasm is rivaled only by its consistency. Imagine the worst rainstorm you have ever experienced, but then imagine that it also never ended, and is still going on, somewhere deep inside your head, such was its tenacity. Entire weeks are swallowed whole as we neo-Noahs courageously attempt to conduct our daily business in the conceit that we do not appear to be living in the end of days. That said, nearly all of this commentary is actually based on my memories from my high school exchange. This year the rainy season is rather relaxed...suspiciously so, in fact. I can only assume that the sky is stockpiling rain for next year, when it will finally unleash its full fury and kill us all in one fell swoop. Either that or global warming is progressing faster than anticipated.

I could buy that second explanation, in fact, simply based on the events that follow. A nationwide heatwave, peaking at 37 (!) degrees in Kyouto, becomes the day's stop story, and it's only going to get hotter. I begin to wonder if Cologne and I could sublet our room as a nuclear reactor. Worse, though, is the humidity. It wouldn't be nearly so bad if it were a dry heat. As it is, people no longer walk from place to place so much as wade through the atmosphere. If someone were to sneak into my bathroom and turn off the tap while I was showering, I wouldn't even notice. Everyone begins to carry personal oxygen supplies with them everywhere they go.

True sleep has become impossible. The most we can hope for is a sort of deep trance, achieving a kind of restive state but never completely slipping into unconsciousness. We are still generally aware of our surroundings in a dull, irrational way, and frequently fully wake as if coming up for air, an eventuality we fight desperately as we approach the surface, knowing as we do the difficulty of reclaiming rest once we have shaken it off. The common room's peak hours of activity have stretched later and later, as it's pointless to even lie down before at least 1 am. When we do wake, we must drain our beds using an industrial-strength water pump before we are able to clamber out of them. Cologne and I have found ourselves without an aircon, opened the door to our balcony in response, and, when that proved insufficient, did the same with the door to the hallway. Throwing caution to the wolves, we now just keep it like this all the time, as we'll sooner risk having our stuff ganked than face certain death by heat exhaustion.

On the other hand, after the heat reaches a certain point the women more or less stop wearing clothes - leaving me awash in that beautiful bronze skin I love so much - so I think I'm at a net gain in the end.

Third wheel

I've got to be brutally honest here, we've had some fun times, but hanging out with Cologne so much lately has really reminded me why I don't normally do that. So, I was pretty stoked to finally be having a night out that didn't include him. See, I got to talking with the girl we met at the udon shop, and we agreed to meet up, and since for various reasons people who want to see me again usually want Cologne to come as well (either to be polite, or they want to recreate the magic, or they think the two of us come as a fucking set), I suggested inviting him as well. To which her reaction was basically, “Yeah...about that.”

But Cologne, oh Cologne! He still wanted to go out that night, and unfortunately, I'd already mentioned to him that Udon and I were thinking of hanging out. So I spent literally one entire day of having him nag me about “our” plans, and being really flaky about not knowing what was going on or even if I wanted to go out at all tonight because I am just so tired, and blah blah blah would you just leave now please. Eventually he did, I rushed to get ready, and met up with Udon. Success!

So we started skipping happily down the street together and what the fuck it's Cologne. Walking straight toward us.

You've gotta...are you fucking......really?

I really have to stress the truly catastrophic luck required for that coincidence. If we'd walked by a minute earlier, if he'd walked by a minute later, if for any reason he hadn't been walking down that side of that exact street at that exact moment, we'd have been golden. What the actual fuck.

So he latches onto us as we head for the train station, trying to shake him off, and we're standing in front of the elevator waiting to go down and I say, well, we're going to Oosaka, what are you going to do. Are you going to go to the udon shop again? Maybe spend some time at Ing? Trying to communicate, with my eyes and my tone of voice, that he should really, really maybe think about doing those things. And he assures me that no, it's no problem, he'd be happy to go to Oosaka tonight! And he turns away for a moment and Udon shoots me a look like she maybe wants to stab someone in the kidney, and I try to apologize with my face.

Obviously it would have been a lot better if Cologne hadn't been there, but the night wasn't a total loss. She took us to an awesome Italian restaurant, like with actual Italian Italian food, and then to another Hub location. And as things went on, Udon and I started drifting closer and closer together, until we were practically sitting in each other's laps, and Cologne is watching all this and still trying to flirt with her, because Jesus fucking Christ, he is the motherfucking picture of KY if ever there was one. At one point she was comparing the colours of our eyes (mine blue and intriguing, his brown and boring) and Mr Don Juan Wannabe thought it would be a great idea to use that as an excuse to get his face as close to hers as possible. She jerked her head away in alarm and smacked him, startled, which I'm sure he took to be a positive, flirtatious response. She didn't seem to mind my face being too close, though. Just saying.

She kind of started rubbing my leg underneath the table while we talked, and at karaoke she turned the lights off and we sort of half-cuddled together, but couldn't really do anything more interesting because Cologne wouldn't give us any space. So, in summary, holy fuck, Cologne. Learn to read. It definitely would have been a better night without him, but Udon and I might meet again before my visit to Canada, so we'll see what happens. I'm assuming nothing, but we'll see what happens.

On the way home, I tried to stop Cologne from getting into the women-only carriage, which is signified by abundant signage and being bright fucking neon pink. A devout contrarian, he refused to believe me. When we arrived, he confirmed that he had indeed been the only man aboard (giving me his trademark creepy grin as he said this), and that he had gotten some dirty looks...but still claimed that I was wrong.

Three Nights of Beer

Good news, boys and girls. I am fresh off a three-day drinking spree, something I don't often get a chance at. Each sessions, we went out early in the evening and stayed until the first train, immediately falling asleep only to wake up and do it all again, so that finally everything just seemed to melt into one long night out. It was a hell of a lot of fun, and in this post, I'm going to tell you why. Well not so much tell you why as tell you what happened, in the hopes that the why will be self-evident.

We started, as you do, at Zaza. Of all people, Jason Biggs came swaggering in, trailing behind a few guys from our school. Naturally, I waved them over, and there we were. Jason Biggs, being Jason Biggs, didn't look too pleased about this, presumably because he didn't want to sit with me. We're in the middle of a feud because he thinks I stole his computer mouse, which first of all, why would I even, and second, it turned up on another desk, meaning it was probably moved by the cleaners. Fuck him. I doubt this would occur to him, but it's not like I'm exactly his biggest fan either. Chotchy prick.

Some Australian tourist girls joined us, and Jason Biggs had right at it. Even though he has a Japanese girlfriend, who, in turn, has another, Mexican boyfriend who doesn't know about Jason Biggs. And supposedly he also has a fiancee back in Italy? Attractive people are fucked up.

When Cologne finished his shisya, we left them to their devices and moved on to Ing. Ha, look at me, writing in past tense and referencing bars by name, I'm fucking Dating in Korea over here. Except a younger, male, Canadian version, and much less romantically successful, and a student rather than a teacher, and in Japan rather than Korea. Actually, I'm nothing like Dating in Korea, am I.

A group of young kids came in and we asked to sit with them. See, you kind of can't do that shit when you're alone. Then you're just the creepy loner trying to make friends. The main guy, pretty clearly the leader of the group, was half-Japanese and half-American, though he looked fully American to me. The two Japanese girls and Venezuelan girl were pretty cool too, but unfortunately they all left before they'd even finished one drink. Hopefully we didn't scare them off with our extreme loserishness.

Rude Boy: Is it just me, or did that guy look kind of like Justin Bieber.

Cologne: Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. But the eyes are different.

Rude Boy: No way, he's basically a mirror image.

Cologne: I guess there's some resemblance.

Rude Boy: He looks more like Justin Bieber than does Justin Bieber himself.

No sooner had we finished our first beer, though, than the Australians from before drifted back into our lives, now absent Jason Biggs, and we all had to cuddle up to fit everybody. Cologne went over to hit on a couple of jukujo and I got thrown into a conversation with some Pennsylvanian tourists. Fucking tourists, everywhere. Get the hell out of Kiyamachi. Fortunately these guys were relatively cool, but the American guy who we were stuck with afterwards was not. When Cologne's ladies left, this guy spent the lifespan of Polaris trying to coach Cologne on the subtleties of picking up Japanese women. Mostly this manifested itself as an improbable list of his own conquests, backed up with semi-relevant boasting. “I've been here ten years! I've studied the culture! I speak Japanese! I've been learning since I was in high school!” At this point, I quietly coughed.

We finished out with another round of shisya, after which Cologne instantly collapsed outside the store, his legs too weak to support his body. Probably not so much from the alcohol, as I've seen him down much more than that without problems, but rather from the double-dose of flavoured smoke, and the attendant dehydration and respiratory atrophy. I managed to move him across the street and lie him down, and the girl came out and brought us a glass of water. I sat with him in silence for two hours, as passing pedestrian occasionally shot us looks, until he sort of woke up and was ready to slowly make his way to the train station.

Cologne had so much fun he wanted to do all of the same things again the second night, including going to the udon shop, and then going to the udon shop again later the same night, this time just for beer. I worry that we've been wearing out our welcome, but it seems that for the moment we're still able to provide the owner with some degree of entertainment. More importantly, we ran into some people there, including a shady-looking but genuinely cool old guy and a 26-year-old girl, who, thanks entirely to my conversational skills (though that's not how Cologne will make it sound when he tells the story), offered to take us to the next place. It turned out to be just one floor above Ing, and had one of those deals where there's a karaoke system set up behind the bar, to boot.

Karaoke with Cologne, if I haven't mentioned this before, is fucking painful. He believes himself to be an incredibly talented singer, putting on a show as though everyone present has excitedly gathered specifically to hear him perform, though the result is more of an overproduced, self-absorbed wail. He gets pissed off if someone joins him, too, though he won't hesitate to jump into somebody else's song. It's all very arrogant, but fuck it, it's karaoke, if somebody genuinely talented (like Hyeong) steps up it can be very enjoyable to listen to, but nobody's gonna give you hell if you aren't up to standard. Well, I shouldn't say that. Cologne will. Cologne will totally give you hell if he thinks you're not up to his standards.

The real problem, though, is that he has absolutely no understanding of karaoke etiquette. None. The polite practice is to put your song in, sing it, and then pick another one. That shouldn't even have to be explained. That's just common fucking sense. Cologne, however, slots in three or four at a time, to the increasing boredom of everyone quietly waiting for their turn, as he repeatedly says, genuinely surprised but quite pleased, “Oh, it's me again!” If called out, he retorts that the real problem is that everyone else needs to put their songs in too slow. Not when you're Bogarting one of two remotes, you graceless twit. One time I actually saw him trying to put another song in while still singing.

Anyway, at this point Cologne tried to jack the girl, whom I'd been talking to continuously for the last half hour, but I was like “lolno” and left him to his ear-melting solos. I managed to get her LINE, at least.

Our third and final evening of adventure started out at Hub and moved to Zaza, both of which failed to turn up anything more than a soccer match at the former and overly loud foreigners at the latter. So we stepped outside.

Rude Boy: Oh look, who's that!

It was Justin Bieber and Mother Russia, milling around in front of Zaza with a German girl and a Brazilian girl. I tried to chat with Mother Russia, and everyone felt awkward for a bit. I asked the German girl if thatwas a parrot on her shoulder. She said that it was not.

To my eyes, it was pretty clear that Justin Bieber was gunning for Mother Russia. And really, all I could do was grit my teeth, because he was of course well within his rights. But it wasn't fun to watch.

We left them to their devices, but we were soon back. Zaza on a Saturday night is an ok crowd. We milled around upstairs for a bit, the two of them went down to get some space, Cologne tried to cockblock a Japanese guy and girl, a different Japanese guy tried to get me to teach him German. Justin Bieber and Mother Russia went back to hanging outside the front.

Random European guy to Mother Russia: Man, you're the first Japanese girl I've met who spoke good English!

Ultimately it was back to Ing once again. There was a German guy and some old Japanese guy in there already. Very nondescript, kind of quiet. Later on he came up in an unrelated conversation with unrelated people, who showed me a picture. I was warned that he was a huge playboy, and also bisexual, and that I should watch myself. Haha, dive bars!

Then it was back to the udon shop, and then back to Zaza, which had closed, and so Cologne wanted to go back to Ing again. After basically 72 hours of all Cologne, all the time, and now probably a bunch of people thinking we hang out together on the regular, I begged off, and went to see if I could find Justin Bieber's regular group down at Sanjou Oohashi. There was no sign of them, so I wandered back to Kiyamachi.

I finally found Mother Russia outside Zaza, talking to some French guy. So we all started talking, I was mistaken for a Belgian, we started gossiping about some of the other lowlifes who frequent this area, and there we go, finally we were just having a normal conversation again. We shared laughs. She let me hold onto her purse for balance. It was great. I felt like maybe we could be close again. And that, you guys, is an excellent feeling.

Sweets Paradise

I've long wanted to pay a visit, but never really had the opportunity. There are many things in Kyouto that I can seek out and try on my own, but Sweets Paradise is not one of them. Just imagine what they'll say! “Look at that foreign guy sitting in the corner. Is he...is he here by himself?” Fortunately, I finally got my chance, enlisting along with Tiny Korean Girl, one of the Taiwanese girls I took Japanese with last semester, and two of the dormitory assistants. Flawless camouflage!

We all bought a ticket, of which there was only one option, that was then immediately taken away by our waitress, which seems to defeat the purpose just a little. It makes sense when it prevents the people making the food from having to handle cash, but here it seems to serve little to no useful purpose, besides keeping the staff from learning to count money. Anyway, the decor was overwhelmingly red and yellow, perhaps not the smartest move for a tabehoudai place, since those are the colours that make you want to eat more. There was, for some reason, a single giant table in the middle of the room, lanterns hanging from the ceiling, and pinwheels and paper chains attached to the walls.

Though the primary (and, really, only) reason to go there is the sweets, Sweets Paradise provides a fairly robust range of normal food as well. It's all pretty standard salad bar-type fare: Spaghetti, coleslaw, raw vegetables, nothing especially spectacular or unusual but all of surprisingly good quality considering. When Cologne went, or rather was unable to weasel out of going, he described the strategy as first loading up on enough actual food to make you not feel like quite such a horrible, disgusting person, and then going to town on the cakes. The girls I was with, however, chose to alternate, that their tongues would not tire. All playstyles are accepted, it would seem.

Now you'll notice that I said “cakes.” The name of the restaurant would seem to suggest a wide array of sugared delights, but in actual fact the prospective masticator is greeted mainly with a wall of baked confections. To be sure, the variety is so vast as to paralyze one with indecision. Cheesecake, bunt cake, pound cake, roll cake, raspberries, strawberries, blueberries, oranges, kiwis, creams, sauces, beverages. Do you take the lemon meringue cake, the cake with lemon baked right in, or the cake with the lemon veneer on top? At the very end of the shelf, there is a modest collection of yogurt, Jell-o, and the like, in case you want a little extra, but it comes off as an afterthought.

As for being the only guy, I needn't have worried. Indeed, the majority of the clientele were young females (three of them children having a birthday party), but there were a handful of couples scattered here and there as well, which must have been nice. But then the assistant pointed out a group of two, and then four guys who'd come here by themselves. “You're not weird,” she assured me. “You at least came with girls.”

On the way home, we stopped for an hour of karaoke, and right in the middle, it hit me again: one of those moments of “this is where I belong” that I sometimes feel here, that it all felt so natural and good, that I'm doing exactly what I'm supposed to be doing. And that – well, it's not that the little moments are necessarily more important than the big ones, or more satisfying, but that the big moments are few and far between, so it's the little moments that you really have to learn to recognize and enjoy. And, of course, that good company makes everything worthwhile.

Raw and wrong

“Come on, let's sit down here.”

“Really? Just the two of us, sitting on the riverbank and drinking?”

“Yup.”

“Great, sounds romantic.”

“Of course! You know that I want to share all my love and affection for my very best roommate Rude Boy!”

“Wow, when did you turn into Insufferable Dumbass?”

Usually I turn Cologne down when he wants to hang out somewhere. I get lazy, and I hate hanging out with other foreigners. Plus, Cologne can be kind of annoying, and I have to spend enough time with him as it is. It doesn't help that he wants to be the King of Japanese Romance, either, and thinks that it is my express responsibility to attend to all of his translation and social lubrication needs therein. But he's lured me out with the promise of a new bar, so now we're pre-drinking amidst a gaggle of orange lanterns and a crowd of mostly ryuugakusei.

I have no idea what the lanterns are for, but they're clearly some attendant element of some kind of minor festival. A bunch of food stalls, nearly all selling identical udon, have been unfurled under Sanjou Oohashi, with entirely too many revelers packed into the narrow space remaining. It's like a small, fairly unimpressive festival. “I heard it's like a children's festival,” says Cologne, “but I don't see what this has to do with children.” Mother Russia and 18 should be somewhere in the area, the latter distinguishable by her eye-catching red hair, but we don't see them, and it's not like we're going to hang out anyway. Our interest quickly drains and we sit down to enjoy our beer.

We continue to mock Insufferable Dumbass for quite some time. Mercifully, he's left the dormitory several days before, and the ambient volume has plummeted. Cologne asserts the impossibility of a long-distance relationship, predicting a breakup within two months of his returning to Hawaii, which I think is rather optimistic of him. Just the night before, Jason Biggs said that she'd told the other Chinese girls that she was only dating him because she wanted somebody to take care of her while she was in Kyouto.

We extricate ourselves from the piles of people milling about the area and head to this bar Cologne has heard so much about. Fortunately he already knows where it is and we find it without much difficulty, on the second floor of a nondescript building next to that shady-looking Turkish kebab place, two turns down a mildewed and decrepit hallway. The lighting is dark, classic rock paraphernalia adorns every available surface, and we're immediately greeted in English. We order beers.

Of the fifteen or so customers already in the place, every single one is foreign. None is under 30. Only two are women. All look very American, and very English teachery. But the atmosphere is convivial and the music is good, even if the service leaves something to be desired.

“I've never had a nama biiru take this long. You just fill the glass. Is he brewing it back there?”

“No, I think he's still harvesting the barley.”

Cologne calls out the owner to let him know that we're there on a regular's recommendation. He's kind of a combination of a host club owner, Murakami Haruki, and Heath Ledger's character from Lords of Dogtown. Later, Ace of Spades comes on and Cologne and I start to rock out and sing along, because we're buzzed and because fuck you, it's a fun song. The owner catches our eye and when I look over, he rolls out his tongue and throws up the horns. I decide in that moment that I'll definitely be making my way back here sometime.

When we leave, we have the brilliant idea of trying to get down the stairwell without touching the floor. Cologne gives up immediately but I try to parkour my way along the banisters and wall overhangs, ducking spiderwebs and finally falling when I stab the shit out of my hand on the most jagged stucco ceiling in the world. It bleeds on and off the rest of the night.

Cologne takes me to another bar, one he's already been to, and which there is no way in hell you'd ever find if you didn't already know it was there. In fact, he has to forage around for a bit himself. It ends up being halfway down one of those little hallways leading between Kiyamachi and Pontochou. “Ah, this is it!” he finally says, victoriously grasping the handle of a small, square door that comes up to my stomach. It looks like a wooden wall panel, with absolutely no signage to suggest that it might conceal anything more interesting than a water pressure valve. But indeed, it opens into a tiny bar, slightly smaller than our bathroom, about ten customers squashed inside. Sadly, there's only about ten chairs.

Luckily we're not out of ideas, as there's one more place Cologne wants to show me: A small udon shop right nearby, just as nameless and nearly as hidden as the bar. He peers through the glass and recoils. “Ok, so do you want to eat udon and see me get my heart broken, or do you want to go somewhere else?”

A few weeks ago, he went out to some bar and spent a few hours talking with a couple of Japanese girls, and now he thinks he's the smoothest operator in the land. He got his comeuppance, though, by thinking that he was getting somewhere with one of the girls, who dodged his attempts at getting a date before finally fessing up that she had an “important boyfriend.” Reacting entirely too badly to such a routine failure, he's now been treating her like the one that got away. I don't really feel like udon but I do want to see how this plays out, so I usher us inside.

The girl, who introduced Cologne to both these places, immediately waves to him when we sit down, but he pretends not to recognize her. Can't say she's my type, but the two staff are another story. According to Cologne, this shop is very popular with male patrons for its flirtatious bottle fairy of an owner, and I can see why. Total jukujo. Tooootal jukujo. And the girl, she's 25, and gyaaru-ish, and she's got that whole oneechan vibe going for her, and every inch of her face and body is just plain fuckable. No other word to describe her. Was that crass? I'm not even sorry.

They take to me instantly, as Japanese women tend to do (and then immediately get bored after like one meeting). As soon as they figure out how much Japanese I speak they're all over me, and then they pass it back and forth like a couple of pros. I can be pretty shy, but tonight I'm also drunk, and not only that, they are doing absolutely everything right to make me feel comfortable. Flirting constantly, poking fun at just the right moment in just the right ways, teasing personal details out of me to get me to relax. They've got a perfect older sister/younger sister mentor type vibe going. The owner comes around and sits with me for a while. Even though I know I'm being gamed, it's incredible to watch in action, and who gives a fuck anyway, I'm enjoying myself.

In the middle, I realise: There's something off about these two. Something raw and wrong. I've finally found the dirt in this city. I knew where it was – Kiyamachi – but I could never make any of it mine. Well, never give up.

“I'm so jealous of you right now,” Cologne whispers as they shower me with attention.

He complains idly of the heat, so the owner moves us to underneath the fan, and, incidentally, right next to the love of his life. Now he's forced to acknowledge her. She claims to be 32, though Cologne swears she told him she was 25. She definitely doesn't look 25. I tell her she does.

“Listen,” she says, “tell him I'm sorry about what happened.”

“I'm fine with it,” he shrugs. “I guess I just misunderstood some things and I ended up disappointed. So yeah, I'm kind of upset, but I'm not mad or anything. Don't translate that!”

“...kind of upset, but he's not mad or anything. Mm? Oh, too late.”

“I have a very important boyfriend,” she says.

“And how old is he?”

“29.” Pause. “I...I have a thing for younger men.”

I relay the information to Cologne, and through me they exchange a few more pleasantries before she and her female companion leave. I manage not to point out that Cologne is totally a younger man (with six years' difference rather than a paltry three); I've caused enough trouble for one night. And it was completely worth it.

We finish our udon and stay for one more round of beer. The two staff pay probably a little bit too much attention to us (me), but the other men seem to get a kick out of the show anyway. I don't know how much is salesmanship and how much is the two of them just having fun, but it's a great vibe in any case. One of the other customers, a grinning, kingpin-looking guy in his 30s, randomly wants to shake my hand as we leave.

Zaza's isn't my favourite place in the world, but Cologne wants to smoke some shisya. For whatever reason, he also badly wants me to try.

“I don't smoke.”

“That's not a very Japanese attitude. You have to try new things!”

“The Japanese do not try new things.”

“Sure they do. You explain shisya to them and then everyone wants to try.”

Beat.

“...can it give you cancer?”

“No.”

“Ugh, fine.”

I give it a few rounds but I don't see the point. Smoking cigarettes is sexy as all fuck, at least when a girl does it, but this is just stupid. Although admittedly, carrying a hookah around with you would be pretty badass.

A couple of girls are sitting at the table next to us, and Cologne wants to break the ice by asking what flavour of shisya they're partaking of. It's not a terrible opener, so I go grab another round, to give him time to work. We've done this a couple times before, and it usually works pretty well if he establishes the connection and I come in afterward to keep things moving smoothly. The girls turn out to actually be Chinese, but fortunately speak Japanese well enough to communicate. Cologne takes down a number that he will never make use of.

They leave, and I manage to strike up a conversation with the group next to us. The one girl out of the five of them there is pretty darn cute, but, predictably, taken, and has been for a solid two years. I can't even imagine being in a relationship for that long. Thought the same thing when I found out Chappy had been with her boyfriend for three years, too. She and Plumfield's girlfriend thought that was a pretty remarkable reaction. We invite them back to the little bar from which we had earlier been rejected.

Unfortunately, this is where my cognitive abilities have walked up to the alcoholic cliff and thrown themselves right the fuck off of it. I act on the impulse to pay for everybody in there. We don't cause any trouble, but by the time we leave, I can barely stand. We all head down to Sanjou Oohashi so I can convalesce.

Fortunately, when all I have in my system is beer I'm a pretty cooperative drunk. Unfortunately, I drop my cell phone in the Kamo River, destroying the screen. I will take it back to Yodobashi Camera, but they'll tell me that I can only keep my current account, SIM card, and memory if I upgrade to a newer, better phone. I can't just buy the same one again. Fuckers. So I'll eventually decide to just leave it in my room, plugged into the wall. It's a land line is what it is. Worse, this doesn't happen soon enough to prevent me from messaging Mother Russia: “<333333333,” perhaps the single worst thing I could possibly have said. On the bright side, I don't die.

Total damage: 90,000 yen.

Exam season

As of last week, I have finally finished all my exams. This is always a bit of a trying period, but that goes double here, considering I not only had to tangle with the additional difficulty of conducting them in a foreign language, but am also trying to cram as much Japanese enjoyment into my remaining time as possible, and it's been a little difficult to fully relax knowing that there was still work left to be done. Hell, even now, I still have the spectre of travel preparations looming over me. But we're not talking about that today.

No, I just want to say that I still find the Japanese exam system, or at least the one used by my school, to be totally vexing. I mentioned some of the details when I wasrunning the gauntlet last semester, but I think they deserve revisiting. For one, each exam is blocked in for only an hour. One single, paltry hour. This is insanity. It took me longer than that to write this blog post, never mind trying to bring together all the knowledge I have accumulated in a full semester's course. Even more bizarrely, both Enjoyably Study Korean exams could be comfortably completed within about fifteen minutes or so, leaving 90% of the class to sit aimlessly until the required 40 minutes had elapsed and we were allowed to exit the room.

At my Canadian university, the standard exam block is three hours, and that's always seemed about right. And even then, the exam itself is only one, admittedly large component of your final mark. Throughout the preceding weeks you'll be hit with some combination of essays, one-page assignments, presentations, quizzes, maybe a special project or something. Usually the final exam is worth 60% (although I've seen it as low as 20%), so you can't just write it off, but you can at least do poorly on the exam and still pass the course.

In Japan, however, the exam is often all you've got. Now of course this has the advantage of a drastically lesser workload during the semester, allowing you to schedule your studying around the countless other demands on your time, but you're also getting no feedback. If you've misunderstood something, you might never find out what your mistake was. You've got one hour. One attempt. And if you had a sudden crisis and couldn't revise, or woke up with a concentration-crippling fever? Bummer. I can't say for sure, but my experience elsewhere leads me to suspect that the concept of a makeup exam is not one that Japanese professors would be familiar with.

And as I've said before, there isn't even a clock on the wall, making time management a bit of a guessing game. A few of the topics from last semester's History of Japanese Thought were reiterated this semester, but I decided to challenge myself on the exam and write on different topics. It would be good practise, I thought, and would force me to look more deeply into material I had not yet mastered. So I went in, and managed to hammer out what I thought was a decently written, well-reasoned, mostly coherent explanation of Shoutoku Taishi's 17 Kenpou, and was feeling pretty good.

But just as I was readying myself for an eloquent concluding paragraph, the teacher announced that 40 minutes had elapsed, and anyone who was already finished was free to go. Of course I wouldn't expect myself to be done by then, not for an essay-writing exam designed to be completed in one hour by native speakers. I would, however, hope to be at least half-done by the halfway point, meaning I was severely lagging. I rushed out my final paragraph, abandoned my prior aspirations, and went with the Juugyuuzu again, because I knew for a fact that I could at least hit the most important points. My efforts basically amounted to a list and I didn't even have time to do a conclusion. It might be interesting if I could look back on last semester's exam and see how much my writing's improved, but still. Lame!

At least this method requires real output from the examinees, though. A distressingly high ratio of exams seem to be strictly multiple choice. Not just like a multiple choice focus, but literally that's the only type of question. As a student I'm a huge fan of multiple choice, because they're by far the easiest question type (followed closely by matching), but if I'm going to make wildly speculative generalizations about the future of an entire culture and nation of people, I would have to say that this is a roundly terrible system for Japan. Multiple choice, as we all know, requires next to nothing. Never mind that you automatically have a 25% chance of getting a question right even if you guess at random, you don't actually need to understand the correct answer. Hell, you don't even need to reproduce it. You just have to be able to recognize it. All that's required to do well is a ton of rote memorization, which is rather fitting, seeing as it's kind of systemic of, you know, the entire Japanese education system. (And remember, I went through a semester of Japanese high school and a year of Japanese university, taking native-level classes the entire time; I'm allowed to say that.)

As I say, though, it did work to my advantage for World of Philosophy, as skills like process of elimination are naturally perfectly transferable to the Japanese setting. Since the content was almost entirely things I learned in English years ago, I really had only two obstacles with which to contend: Terminology and kanji, there being some overlap between the two. I definitely could have brushed up on terminology a little more, since being able to outline the distinguishing characteristics of empiricism and rationalism is useless if I don't know which one I'm being asked about. Kanji, though, is not a problem I can breach with a few nights of cramming. There were times where I couldn't read the question, or the answers, or both, and in those cases there was nothing to be done. I was able to read a lot more than I expected to, which was gratifying, but if I pass, I'll be so super stoked.

I'm not going to say that the Japanese system of exams is wrong. That would be a little summary of me. If anything, the entire institution of standardized testing is wrong, and both the Canadian and Japanese systems are just equally stupid manifestations of a wider problem. Either way, it's just one more wrinkle to smooth out. One way or another, my time at Japanese university is now over, and I've got mixed feelings about that, but I can certainly say that I handled it the very best I could.

Dormitory farewell party

When last semester's farewell party rolled around, I wasn't particularly enthused. I'd been keeping on the fringes of dormitory life, after all, and while I certainly had some “friends,” I'd never felt especially attached to anybody there, so I didn't have any difficulties letting go. Life is full of goodbyes. My advice: Get used to it early. Never stop making connections, but understand that no relationship, romantic or otherwise, is going to last forever. You don't have to like it, but you do have to accept it, because if you don't, you're in for crippling pain.

So I went in this time with much the same attitude. Basically, I thought, I don't want to do this. Mill around for a couple of hours, make idle conversation with people I either don't care about or actively hate, and pretend to be sad? What a downer. And of course I'm obligated to go, which is even worse, because I can't even pretend that I had the choice but decided to be a good sport and come show my face. The only saving grace, really, was a couple of English Club girls and other assorted associates joining in the...festivities.

And then there were those fucking cards again. All departing ryuugakusei got one, and you had to go through them all and write some kind of heartfelt message for them, regardless of whether or not you actually knew them well, or even liked them, or had ever spoken to them. I sat down, grabbed the first card I could see, and sat with my pen poised over it. And I sat. And sat. And after five minutes I still couldn't think of anything to say.

I left, schmoozed, and came back. Ah – Tiny Chinese Girl. I've had class with her the whole year long, surely I can think of something nice to say to her. 「1年間、お疲れ！」One year, over – that's reasonable enough. Ok, now something about having fun together in class. And, erm...she loves rollerskating. She almost joined the Chinese national team. So, good luck with rollerskating, and uh, studying Japanese and...“other stuff.” Boom. Done.

I pick up another and continue in the same vein. I gather steam, and start coming up with increasingly creative and off-the-wall ways of saying basically the same thing over and over. The trick, I'm remembering now, is to think of some small hook, any little shared experience or kernel of information about them, and pull on it. And after a while I start to notice a theme: I actually kind of do know these people. And I like a lot of them a lot more than I thought.

Eventually we gather to each make a short speech. As each person shares of their memories and emotions, I realise the party's true purpose. I thought it was so that our achievement could be recognized. I was wrong. As a bubble of sentimentality wells in my chest, I understand that it's to give us the opportunity to say goodbye.

My turn.

“Everyone, congratulations on one year!”

Applause. As always, I speak off the cuff.

“But even saying that...I can't think of it as a year, eh?”

Much has transpired, but I remember the day I arrived with alarming clarity. I feel like a different person, yet the intervening time is a blur. Time is all fucked up, that's what it is. My heart grew heavy.

Suddenly, in that moment, everything I've been feeling for the last couple of months hit me like a jazz piano. I don't want to leave Japan. I don't want to leave my English Club people. Even if we've fallen apart, I don't want to leave Mother Russia. And as much as it's tried my patience, as much as I've gritted my teeth against the drama and the immaturity and the Jesus Christ would you all stop screaming all the fucking time, I'm realising that I don't even want to leave this house. The practised manner in which I swipe my key-card and swing open the back door? Soon that won't be a thing anymore. My near-daily ritual visits to Cologne's mom's house will be behind me. Some new resident will start keeping his stuff in my room and sleeping in my bed, as if he owns the place. Hey, asshole, get out of there!

I try not to count my blessings, because what the hell is the point in being satisfied with what you already have? That's no way to live. But having spent so much of my life often feeling out of place and unwanted – I partly blame my parents – it's good for me, sometimes, to take stock of the people I have, and I've been one lucky motherfucker in that respect. When I want to achieve something, or I've been beaten down by something, I feel them swell beneath me. The rest of the time, I can see them form a circle around me. Even when I'm alone, I'll never be friendless.