Gion, Part 1: Welcome to the Jungle

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

One of the gifts blogging has given me is a greatly increased appreciation for photography. I used to be indifferent, almost averse to photo ops, reasoning on notability and the power of my own memory, so as a result there are actually some fairly large gaps in my life that I wish I had a little more evidence of. Now, though, I reach for my camera like John Marston reaches for his revolver: At the slightest provocation, with startling speed and accuracy, I will whip it out of my pants and snap off a shot. It's become almost a sub-hobby of blogging itself, and I quite enjoy displaying the occasional pretty picture amid the mass of blurry, incorrectly framed, and poorly lit captures that make up the bulk of my efforts.

With that in mind, I'm going to be something a little more involved than my usual stuffs, and embark on a little Gion Photo Project. In past posts I have simply travelled to a location, seen what I could see, and gone home, but this time I conducted a number of shoots over multiple days, to gather more and varied material. I chose Gion as my subject, just because it's accessible, it's famous, and I think a lot of people might like to see it. Maybe I'm wrong. Hope not.

Gion, of course, is the largest geisha district left in the country. Despite their being a perennial symbol of Japan in the minds of everyone ever, their numbers and significance have dwindled over the last hundred as a result of public apathy, which I would speculate comes from their practicing an outdated medium that nobody enjoys anymore. There is an ongoing push for their preservation, but I'm pretty sure the only way you're going to see a real geisha now is at either a horrendously expensive teahouse or a horrendously expensive performance. That does not mean there's nothing to see in Gion, however.

If you approach Gion from the downtown area, this is the first thing you'll see, sitting directly atop one corner of Gion-Shijou Eki. Notice the mixture of pagoda and Western-style architecture, which suggests the Meiji era, although this might just be me talking out of my hat. Apparently this the place to go for song and dance performances, though obviously I've never been, because I'm not on a business trip or independently wealthy.

 Shijou, east from Gion-Shijou Eki. Kinda the main drag of Gion, if you're gonna pick just one. I like it. Not as much as downtown, but it's cool. Gion is often misunderstood to have been the ancient pleasure quarters, which isn't exactly true, but if you got your money, honey, Gion's got your disease, as long as your disease is upscale shopping and dining, which it has in spades. The best restaurants invariably have long lineups piling down the sidewalk and I suspect it's a good place to buy souvenirs.

 This is the biggest tourist area in what is already a tourist town, and City Hall knows it. おこしやす、by the way, is just 京都弁 for ようこそ。You know, add a little local flavour to the signage and whatever. Fun fact: The local term for geisha (芸者) is actually geiko (芸子).

Aww yeah, the SKETCHY part of Gion! And right off Shijou, too. Awesome stuff. The density of Girls Bars, kyabakura and dive bars rivals Kiyamachi.

 This is just here because I want to stress that Gion is really just a normal part of a normal city. You walk far enough, and you start to find rundown apartment buildings and people living their daily lives. Like everywhere.

 Though I won't deny that Kyouto has a ton of fun little backroads and alleys to explore. I've spent hours wandering around areas like these.

 Is that a magical riverbarge floating above Shijou?! Ah, no, it's the backside of a restaurant on Kawabatamachi.

  Go left at Yasaka-san and you'll find the loneliest road in all Gion. I actually started to get introspective and moody just walking down it, pushing past prostitutes and watching the cars fly by.

 I walked that loooong path only to find that it kind of goes nowhere.

 Planning a trip to Gion? You might want to remember this gate.

 Cause this is where it leads. This is probably more like what you envisioned Gion being, isn't it? It's certainly a nice walk.

 You can maybe find some geiko teahouses if you're seriously looking for one.

 Throughout Kyouto at large, you are likely to find Japanese tourists decked out in yukata, but those numbers skyrocket in Gion. Don't immediately assume that you have spotted a troupe of those elusive geiko and start frantically taking hundreds of pictures, as those most eye-rollingest of foreign tourists do. They're there, but you're unlikely to find them. Rule of them: If you see a woman you think is a geiko, she is probably not a geiko. If she's in public and her face isn't painted, then definitely not.

Yasaka-san at night. Two kyabakura girls watched me take this photo. "Now Rude Boy!" you exclaim, positively stamping your feet with indignance. "Just because a girl dresses a certain way in a certain part of town doesn't automatically mean she's a kyabakura girl!" You know what, don't even. Sometimes you can just tell, don't even pretend that you can't. Plus, one of them went into a kyabakura almost immediately after, so yeah, kyabakura girl.

Here's the view from the steps of Yasaka-san, which is going to segue nicely into Part 2.

Barroom busking

Tonight Cologne and I went on a little expat-bar pub-crawl. Anybody familiar with this blog will be able to guess how I feel about expat bars, but Cologne loves the living shit out of them, and since half the Japanese in the room are there because they want to meet foreigners, I will grudgingly concede that they are, counterintuitively, a good way to meet people. We ended up at Zaza's, but we started at Pig & Whistle, because Pig & Whistle.

I was wondering if Golden Week was maybe going to draw a significant crowd, but it was actually kinda dead (though Sanjou Oohashi was decently populous). Actually, us two and a busily busing white guy were the only foreigners in the place, so I was ready to get comfortable. Tonight they had a few different acts for our entertainment, including a little three-piece set of guitar, drums and keyboard, and damn but the keyboardist was a cutie. Neither of us knew a single song they played, but it was all pretty soft and relaxing stuff – a little light jazz, a bit of blues, and Feist. Canada represent! I winced when Keyboards, the frontman, described one of the songs they were covering as originally having been played by “four black people,” but otherwise it was pretty much just some mild background music to accompany the Asian Ballroom Dancing Championship and secondhand smoke.

Then, in their last song, the guy announced that he was super sorry and all, but he was going to come around with a hat and if you could maybe consider giving them a few hundred yen for their trouble, that would be just dandy.

So what the fuck's up with that? Go ahead and try that in a Canadian bar and see what kind of a reception you get. Probably something like “Um...no? I paid for my beer.” See, your audience is doing you a far bigger favour by experiencing your work than you're doing them by producing it. Doesn't matter how good you are or what you do. Whether they're listening to your set, watching your film, or reading your slashfic, they have absolutely no goddamn obligation to do it and you'd better well appreciate it, because to some extent creating quality art is an end in itself, but you're lying if you try to tell me that you don't then want to show it off.

You can come back to me and say that they're just offsetting the costs they incurred in terms of transportation, purchasing their masses of equipment, and, you know, investing years into learning how to play an instrument. But then I'll ask you, what the hell is that shit? Music is a hobby like any other, and hobbies cost money. Maybe you have aspirations, somewhere in the far, far future of being able to make a modest living off your skills, but pleasure, self-fulfillment, and the enjoyment of your audience should be the rewards you're shooting for. In the meantime, just be satisfied with your free beer and the fact that, hey, you actually got to play for somebody other than your parents and partners for once.

Cologne and I both shifted uncomfortably and coughed up 500 yen each, but it fucked with the mood a little bit. We left shortly after.

Gaijin Tales! Couch Wars

Insufferable Dumbass: (encountering me coincidentally at post office, very excited) Rude Boy, what the fuck are you doing here?!

Rude Boy: ...Calisthenics class.

Insufferable Dumbass: Really?

*

Rude Boy: (stares at legs of passing girl for several seconds, then checks out her face)

Girl: (not impressed)

Rude Boy: (no sense trying to hide it now, goes back to staring at legs)

*

Jugs: why are there fingers

Jugs: in mouths?

Rude Boy: because europeans apparently think that that is acceptable

Jugs: ...

Jugs: in what context?

Jugs: like

Jugs: just

Jugs: here let me suck on my fingers?

Rude Boy: just kickin' it in the common room

Rude Boy: no. here let me pick shit out of my teeth for the next seven hours straight

Jugs: hmm.

Rude Boy: oh i spilled a little food on one of my fingers, transferring it into my mouth requires swallowing my entire hand

Jugs: hahaha

Rude Boy: its soooo gross ;_;

*

Rude Boy: Can you break 500 yen?

German guy: (looking at the hard metal coin) Um...probably, if I had the tools?

*

Going for a stroll downtown, a young woman standing with a rollybag on the sidewalk at Shijou and Teramachi stopped me to ask for directions. The way she talked, she seemed to (correctly) assume I was a local, which made me wonder, did I just seem especially comfortable in my surroundings? Was I walking with purpose and confidence, as though I knew where I was going? Or perhaps I merely lacked a wide-eyed tourist gape? Occam's Razor says I was simply white, but I was by no means the only white person around, and she chose to grab me. Anyway, I was happy to help.

Not long after, I was walking alongside an old man who caught sight of me out the corner of his eye, did a startled double-take, and proceeded to openly stare for a solid five or six seconds. Um. This is Kyouto. There's not exactly a shortage of us. “Where are you from?” he asked in English, and I told him, at which point he seemed to realise he had exhausted his vocabulary. Luckily he reached his destination at almost exactly that moment, and excused himself with a smile.

Sitting on the local train home, waiting for the semi-express to go around us, I spied a girl waiting at another track who was a dead ringer for one of my ex-girlfriends. It's like I was looking right at her. Bizarre.

It wasn't a particularly eventful or exciting day, but somehow these three things made it feel like a good one.

*

A motorcycle, a van, two more motorcycles driving in convoy at 2 am.

Yeah that's not suspicious at all.

*

Anarchy in the UK: I'm trying to teach Taiwan about banter...and how it's different from just being abusive.

*

Anarchy in the UK: (enters room)

Rude Boy: Hey Anarchy in the UK, I dreamed you and I took a bath together.

Anarhcy in the UK: That's...the weirdest greeting I've ever gotten.

*

Rude Boy: Are we in Daylight Savings yet?

J-friend: That's in the summer, and we don't have it here.

Her boyfriend (only half-joking): Typical Canadian! The five countries that think they're the centre of the universe? Canada, America, the UK, France, and China.

J-friend: And Korea.

Her boyfriend: Oh yeah, and Korea. Ok fine, maybe not Canada.

*

Anarchy in the UK: Those girls are properly staring at us.

Rude Boy: (distracted) Yeah, let me count how many fucks I give. I'm done.

*

Insufferable Dumbass: No offence, but I'm pretty sure I have better rights than you.

German girl: Like the right to higher education? Or medical care?

*

Hot girl's T-shirt: Snort cocaine, fuck a lot, get pregnant, break bones. Red Loght District.

*

Cologne: (comes in and sits down)

Insufferable Dumbass: (laughs his customary deranged squawk, yells something incoherent into Skype)

Rude Boy: Yeah, it's been this way all morning.

Cologne: Maybe I should go back to bed.

*

Cologne: Insufferable Dumbass wants so badly to be a ladies' man...but he's closer to being a ladyboy.

*

Girls' bar guy: Excuse me, gentlemen, looking for a girls' bar? Good evening, feel like touching some boobs tonight? Hello there Mr. Foreigner, come on in, practise your Japanese!

*

Rude Boy: insufferable dumbass from america just recently discovered the phrase "sou nan?" except he says "sou na?" because his choukai sucks cocks

Rude Boy: and he also recently discovered the word "yabai" as well as the fact that you can use it at basically any time for no particular reason

Rude Boy: so he uses it, sometimes, just over and over again, like 5 or six times per minute. sometimes per second.

Rude Boy: resulting in sentences like, "yabai, yabai. kore ha yabai. ah, yabai. yabai, yabai. yabai." exact quote

Soymilk: Honestly

Soymilk: I think that's pretty natural

Soymilk: If anything

Soymilk: He's lacking yabais

Soymilk: A lot of stupid Japanese people talk like that.

*

Australzealand: He ate my horse! You son of a bitch.

*

I used to leave my cell phone in the common room whenever I took a nap.

Mother Russia: hellooooo lonely keitai!

Mother Russia: aww :( need a hug?

I don't anymore.

*

Anarchy in the UK: And another thing, Insufferable Dumbass thinks it's absolutely amazing that the Italians can understand each other when they speak Italian quickly...I'm like, you idiot, that would be like if I spoke in really fast English to you.

*

One of my blood sisters: Hey Rude Boy! I'm in town again for another couple of weeks. Are you finished exams yet? Do you have time to meet?

Rude Boy: That would be great, except I've been living in Japan for the last seven months and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

Rude Boy: I finish my exams in late July or early August.

*

Insufferable Dumbass: No, you have to do it like this...

Mother Russia: I'll do it however I want.

Insufferable Dumbass: Rude Boy, do something!

Rude Boy: If you think that I can control her, you've severely misunderstood how this works.

*

Australzealand: All I know is, black centre, two petals.

Anarchy in the UK: Uh, three petals?

Rude Boy: Four petals?

Australzealand: ...Wow. The Commonwealth really needs to get its shit together.

*

Tiny Korean Girl learning to ride a bike.

I almost died from cuteness overload.

*

In past posts I have mentioned “my” couch, which is mine in the sense that I have staked such a firm Lockean claim to it that no else dares use it. Eventually, every piece of furniture in all common rooms was replaced. Where before twin couches had sat, we now had a couch and two chairs. Disastrously, the two chairs were placed in my spot, throwing off my entire life. Cough Medicine and Big Finn observed this development with amusement, wondering what I would do.

After a dissatisfying experiment in angling the two chairs into a makeshift couch, I simply swapped things around, but Cologne tipped me off that somebody had it in for me. They were planning to switch them back again, just to fuck with me, but he wouldn't say who, because he wanted to watch the war. (Mother Russia thinks it was him all along.) To prevent their machinations, I gathered as much random shit from about the common room as I possibly could and spread it across my new couch, to make moving it more effort than it was worth. My plan succeeded, and I thought it was over. But then! Days later, they made good on their threat!

There was only one thing to do. I waited until 4 am one lonely weeknight, that I would be the only waking person in the entire dorm. Then I stole to the little-used second-floor common room and ganked their couch. Though bulky and awkward, it was actually mostly hollow inside, and I had no problems carrying it up the stairs by myself; turning on its side made short work of the hairpin hallways leading to the common room. In exchange, I gave our chairs to the second floor. Your move, pranksters!

They went with turning both couches and their attendant table 90 degrees. That was just stupid and not even funny anymore, so I simply turned them both back and there have been no developments since.

Australzealand: How did we get two couches?

Rude Boy: Yeah, that's so weird, I have no idea how that happened.

Australzealand: Suuuuuure. ;)

I like to picture several second-floor residents standing around their four chairs and frowning in confusion.

Shoujou

There are a few “stock Japan blog posts,” that is, subjects you can't really away without at least touching on, like Christmas or hanami. Today I will carve another Japan blog notch in my belt, as I have finally had my first encounter with the Japanese health care system. Most people who arrive here have at least a halfway interesting story to go with it, like “horseback riding accident” or “got into a knife fight,” but sadly I can report nothing more dramatic than a persistent cough.

Japanese culture would have me head straight for the hospital anytime I sneezed too hard, or sneezed too many times in a row, or went too long without sneezing. Of course, outpatient care works a little differently here, but personally I go to the doctor maybe once every three years, not counting visa procedures. For one thing, I've got a nigh invincible immune system, and furthermore, I loathe the idea of filling my body with anymore chemicals than necessary. I get enough in my food, thank you very much. You don't need to start popping pills just because your eye twitched and now you're worried you've got TB in your toes.

But when everyone around you says you should see a doctor, because it's been going on nine days, and it's costing you sleep, I think that constitutes having held out long enough to call it a draw. I made plans to visit the on-campus clinic – so there's my unique and personal spin on this common blog topic – but didn't get around to it until lunching with a few English Clubbers and gazing deeply into their warbling eyes, ensemicircled by brows knit with worry. Shiga insisted on going with me, which I was grateful for, because I knew I would be lacking on some of the technical terminology, and would likely have problems filling out the attendant paperwork, as well.

While we waited for the clinic's lunch break to end, Shiga suggested that we buy a little food, even though I had no appetite and hadn't even eaten anything at lunch, because he (correctly) anticipated that any medicine they might give me would need to be taken with a meal. He also forced me to buy a mask, and it was with great reluctance that I attached it to my face. As “Japanese” as I attempt to live, this is one aspect of Japanese culture that I don't think I'll be adopting. They're utterly useless for one thing; if air can get in, germs can certainly get out. Even so, I'd be willing to acquiesce on grounds of fitting in, but wearing it made be feel incredibly awkward and out of place. There's no reason it should, given that 10% of the people around you at any given time are likely to be wearing one, but come on, I think we can all agree that this is just generally a terrible look for absolutely everybody. In addition to being unhelpful and ugly, I would not be surprised if they actually exacerbated their users' conditions, as within minutes I found that the surface of my face could have mistaken for the surface of Betelgeuse. On the other hand, should you ever find yourself hyperventilating, a mask will certainly cure you of your ills.

Also, masks sometimes cover girls' faces, and I am not ok with that.

How interesting can it be to work at a university clinic? Surely it has its moments, but I doubt that's the job people are dreaming of when they're going through medical school. My nurse was a jukujo who asked me some straightforward questions, confirmed that I did not have a fever, and made me think extremely inappropriate thoughts. Then she passed me onto a grandmotherly sort of doctor who examined my throat before sending me to wait once more. It turned out to be a great surprise Japanese lesson, as I quickly picked up words like 症状 shoujou symptom, 眠気 nemuke drowsiness, and べんぴ benpi constipation, which I'd heard before but never committed to memory for some reason. They left me with both instructions to get lots of rest and a mild regimen of pills to take twice a day with my meals. Which was good luck, since I can't swallow pills, and always end up having to crunch them up anyway, trying to force the shards down my gullet as quickly as possible and then swilling food around my palette, all in the vain hope that I will somehow be able to avoid sampling their horrific bitterness.

As a Canadian, it was totally bizarre to receive some drugs and then realise that I would now be expected to pay for them. A six-day course cost me 1000 yen. I'm told that this is quite inexpensive, but I have no basis for comparison, because I've never paid money for medicine before. I would love to say that my health insurance ended up being a great purchase after all, except that my 16,000 yen investment has so far reaped 2000 in dividends.

The Gaijin Wave

It was lunch hour on campus, and I'd spent most of it in pursuit of a Korean textbook. The bookstore had directed me to a temporary sales stall run out of a big storage room, which required me to know the book's exact title and call number. I tried looking it up on my phone, but for some reason searching gmail crashes it, and thus ensued entirely too much time and effort expended on trying to locate a free computer. Unsurprisingly, the library and other public access terminals were all full to bursting, but in a flash I remembered that two of my academic classes were held in an out-of-the-way building full of nothing but computer labs.

I headed there posthaste, swiped my student card to get through the door, and headed for the first classroom I saw. The hallway was empty but for a lone middle-aged white guy standing near the door, snacking – a good sign, as it boded well for the interior. I peeked through the window on the door. Sure enough, there were only a couple of people inside, and I moved to enter.

“Well, hello to you too.”

The white guy. I'd barely even registered him.

“...what?”

Not the most elegant possible opener, I admit. But the tone of his voice had put my guard up. I'm sorry, should I remember you from somewhere?

His voice held the tone of someone explaining some excruciatingly obvious truth, his sentences rolled off each other without pause.

“Well it seems natural that when you see another foreigner you'd at least acknowledge them, I don't know, maybe you think that's weird, but to me it's just common sense.”

Weird isn't the word for it. More like stupid.

I know there are two different schools of thought on it, and the first one holds that if you meet someone with whom you share the clear camaraderie of being in a foreign country, it's just plain good manners to share a private, verbal high five. There is also, I think, a quite “we gotta stick together!” mentality, because Abroad can be a lonely place, no doubt about that. Besides which, there can be no doubt that we have some shared experiences – our reactions to the culture/food/porn, our struggles toward the perpetually receding horizon that is fluency in the language, our treatment by Japanese, etc. We don't automatically have to be besties, but it at least merits a nod, or a wave, or an interpretive dance.

Personally, I am of the opinion that there is absolutely no need for this, mainly because that is the only thing we have in common. We're both visible minorities, sure, but there's nothing to say that we share a country or even a language. We almost certainly have very different interests. We obviously frequent different circles, because otherwise we'd know each other.

90% of the time I'm not interested in your friendship, or your conversation, or much of anything else you have to offer, so why not go our separate ways? Look here, this is not me being a prick. This is me treating foreigners like anyone else I see in the street, on campus, or anywhere else. Whether or not I approach them is motivated by exactly the same factors: Do I know this person? Do I need them for something? Are they a hot girl?

In a way, I'm treating them exactly like the Japanese that surround us. Their merely being foreign is not enough reason to make any kind of distinction. They are part of the background, mere additions to the sound mosaic, human obstacles to sidestep when they stop dead in the middle of the fucking sidewalk because they don't know where the hell they are or what they are doing. If I don't have some specific reason to strike up a conversation or whatever I'm generally not going to just for the hell of it. To be frank, in the long run I think this is actually better for we non-natives. Our associates draw attention to our foreignness roughly 125,823,738 times per microsecond, so we really need no further reminder from each other. How can we ever expect to successfully integrate into Japanese society if we keep yanking each other out of it?

Actually, I lied a little bit just now. I am absolutely terrible for checking my phone when I see other foreigners. It's partly out of a desire to avoid boring conversations and partly because I want to make it clear that I'm not a daytripper. When I go sightseeing, I always know what time it is.

By the way, as far as I can tell people of the “say hi” persuasion can't stand we of the “What? Where? I didn't even notice” way of thinking. As far as I can tell, they believe us to be full of attitude, arrogant of our Japanese abilities, somehow thinking ourselves better than the petty riff-raff surrounding us. They're welcome to think that, I guess. Personally I don't really care what they think of me, which really is why I don't go out of my way to greet them in the first place, isn't it.

I imagined what his stupid American face must have thought of me, though. Probably that I was some arrogant young punk, believing myself better than he and his cohorts and far more involved in Japan than I really was, that a few chopstick compliments and easy conquests had gone to my head, that without the aid of him and people like him I would die alone and friendless in this exotically inscrutable hellhole. Wrong on all counts, fuckwit, and those are some pretty heavy judgments to be making on the basis of one conversation. Then I realised that I was doing exactly the same thing to him, and maybe he was a perfectly content and happy guy who was just having a rough day or was offended by my youthful haircut or something.

Really though, even if I had committed some unforgivable transgression, how fucking attention-deprived do you have to be to view this as a good use of time? Cause I'm gonna go out on a limb and suggest that this guy probably wasn't trying to let me in on the secrets of gaijin etiquette so much as file a grievance. I certainly hope he feels better about himself and his life now.

I wanted to say some of this, but I bit my tongue.

“Ok.”

Not the best thing to lower his hackles, which is what I'd like to have done, because you never can tell just whose opinion of you is going to end up affecting your life. That secretary you were short with has the power to put your zoning application in one of two piles at her personal discretion; the guy you slap-fought at the bar three years ago ends up on your grand jury. But it's the best I could manage while feeling like I was being abruptly attacked for no reason, and also kind of not giving a shit. Unfortunately, now I'm probably just pissing him off.

“At least that's what all the guy I know think.”

I'm sure that's wonderful for them. Can I leave yet?

“Sure, I suppose that's an all right rule of thumb.”

Beat.

“I'm going in now.”

I tried the door. Locked.

“Damn!”

“It works better if you push it.”

Derp.

“Ah. Thanks for the tip.” Asshole.

I bowed reflexively as I went in.

Across the Universe

Unlike all other classes at my university, which are conducted only once a week, Enjoyably Study Korean and its sisters are split into two partially overlapping sessions in a five-day cycle. You are free to pick whichever of the multiple offerings you like, as long as you take both the A and B courses. The other, it would seem, is more about ancillary aspects of studying the Korean language, while today's is a slightly more straightlaced rendition that aims to have us actually sitting down, scratching out unfamiliar shapes, and getting to grips with grammatical nuts and bolts. It's a principle I can get behind; I'll be the first to say that consistent patterns are the key to successful language-learning.

Then I studied another Asian language, Japanese this time. For the final of my four required academics, I was once more with the same group of Chinese people. I'm really getting to like them; maybe because they're all foreigners themselves and know that we all have a secretly desperate desire for friends, they seem not to be shy about just walking right up and introducing themselves. Anyway this class was all about Reading Comprehension, vital for both the JLPT (whenever I decide to take it) and also every aspect of my entire life. It's also a subject that has a lot of potential for excruciating boredom, but this class at least put out a little effort by having us conduct a series of quizzes. By making it an active process and turning the focus towards our own selves, it became ten times as engaging than it would have been had we been made to just, say, struggle through a passage.

In the late afternoon, Mother Russia and I went to check out the Astronomy Club's regular Friday activities. After a brief reminder of upcoming events, there was a half-hour break while we waited for dusk to fall. I can only imagine that this is going to cut more and more into their actual activity time as summer approaches and the days grow longer. In the meantime, we popped into English Club, because I felt bad for abandoning them on a day I'd regularly have joined in, and Mother Russia was a big hit with the guys. No surprise there. Her Japanese is better than average and, personal taste notwithstanding, nobody would argue that she isn't a striking young woman. Shiga is smitten. I had to laugh at that. She would eat Shiga for breakfast.

Finally it was dark enough to see the stars, but...! The sky was far too cloudy to see anything. Which was awfully bad luck, considering that at this time of year they're trying to lure in new students by showing them all the fun things they do. Luckily, they have a regular backup prepared for just this time at lunch, and inflated a big black tent-like thing in one of the music rooms, then usshered us inside. In the middle they'd placed some kind of pill-shaped machine that projected the basic pattern of the major constellations onto the surface of the nylon bag in which we sat, creating a celestial sphere around us. One of the older students then walked us through locating Ursa Major, the story behind Cassiopoiea, and other such things. Every once in a while the tent would lose some air and begin to sag in places, and the older students would expertly move to right it. It was a pretty fun time, although I did wonder whether the novelty would wear off if you weren't super into stars, and also where a student club gets the money for that kind of setup.

They also set up a small telescope outside and aimed it at Jupiter and Castor, which reminded me of the vastness of interstellar distances and heavenly bodies, the incomprehensible age of the universe, and the insignificance of both my own life and, really, all of humanity in comparison. That started to depress me, so it was fortunate that at that moment Mother Russia decided it was time to go home.

Youroppa Shisoushi

Hope nobody's finding these daily Dear Diary's dull yet. Kind of a new thing I'm trying. This one's brief.

In much the same vein as History of Japanese Thought on Tuesday, I had History of European Thought today, taught by the same teacher. As I've mentioned before, he majored in Philosophy, studied abroad to Germany, and speaks German fluently, so this is a subject that I imagine has a special meaning for him. He opened the class with a kind of questionnaire, asking us who we are, why we came, and finally, the first thing we thought of when he said the word “Europe.” Mine was “German beer.” Must be Cologne's influence finally cracking my subconscious.

In case I've never mentioned this before, and I kind of feel like maybe I haven't, every Thursday lunch is set aside as Bonding Time with our “tutors.” Each of us is assigned one, but I have no idea what they're tutoring us in exactly. Presumably Japanese, since they're supposed to talk to us in Japanese and I guess help us out with any questions we may have, but really, the relationship for most of us does not extend beyond these somewhat condescending lunches. My tutor hasn't even shown up for the last two events at which he should have been present. I'm not exactly giddy, but I'm not super broke up about it either.

Only two classes today because I picked a really strange distribution for myself, with everything bunched up at the beginning of the week and petering off as it wears on. The second was Politics, which I took last term and greatly enjoyed, but I don't know that I much like the direction it's headed this time around. We've been basically railroaded into picking some kind of topic that we will be doing research on every single week, and organizing into some kind of paper at the end. This would be fine, except I don't like to have my scheduling done for me. I usually prefer to have multiple projects coming down the track, but focus on only one at a time, so that my progress is uneven. I don't understand organized people. Never have.

If I asked you which was likely to be harder, Japanese-taught or English-taught courses, you'd think Japanese, right? That seems only natural, since they're in my non-native language. You'd be wrong, though. Japanese courses in university ask practically nothing of their participants, except for in the final exam and occasionally in short bursts during the semester. Otherwise it's flat horizons. The only reason they'll be hard for me is the revision I'll require in order to keep up. The English-taught ones, on the other hand, are generally “American-style,” meaning more discussion-based and consistently work-intensive.

After hanging around with Mother Russia for a couple of hours, I capped off the day with a fairly uneventful session of English Club. Better enjoy it while I can, before I get too busy to make it a regular thing. I was quite looking forward to tonight because the three different sections are currently taking it in turns to invite the shinnyuusei into their lair and attempt to ensnare them. Disappointingly, the eight girls who showed up tonight all flatly refused to mix with the regular members when it came time for the activities, instead remaining in an amorphous mass off in one corner of the room on grounds of being shy and nervous. Conversation section's new vice president quickly stepped into the fray to explain the club and walk them through the activities. Not forcing them to mix when they weren't up for it was the right call and his fix was smooth and effective, but you gotta get over it sometime kids.

The regular members, of both sexes, conducted an informal poll after the shinnyuusei left and general consensus is that not one of them was cute.