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.

Permarushing

There's one problem with arriving at a new school halfway through the year: You end up missing a lot of the welcome parties and mixers, where new students meet the friends they'll treasure for the next year and possibly their whole lives, and returning students seek out the loosest and most impressionable new students they can find. Basically my strategy this semester is to go to as many as these as I possibly can. I'm not even going to join the clubs or anything (although maybe I'll go sometimes if the members or the content seem cool); I'm just going to try to meet vast amounts of people.

Mother Russia, whom I've been spending a lot of time with lately – see, I goddamn told you guys I don't hate all foreigners – has been getting super into the Astronomy Club of all things. Not one I would likely have looked into myself, but today they had a hanami party and she invited me along. Hanami (花見、“flower-viewing”), if you aren't aware, is pretty much THE thing to do in spring in Japan, when the sakura, for a very brief window of a couple of weeks, are in beautiful bloom, before their petals scatter to the winds and they are once again bare for the entire rest of the year. Japan is hardly the only country to have sakura – I believe they are present in Korea and parts of China, at least – but they are by far the proudest of them. You'll do hanami with your friends or coworkers. It's a stock event in fiction. It was the whole motif that drove Hitching Rides with Buddha. And, perhaps most importantly, it's a fantastic excuse to get drunk in public, so you can understand the popularity.

We didn't drunk, because...well because that would have been kind of inappropriate, but I did get to sit and chat with quite a few awesome people for three or four hours. Which was pretty much my goal, so that's progress. I'll be checking out other Astronomy Club events, that's for sure. And they'll see me on campus and we'll stop to chat, and geez it looks like I'm FINALLY starting to get back to the days where I literally couldn't go more than five minutes without seeing somebody I knew. Hehehe.

I left early to go check out BRIDGE, some kind of international circle or something, held at Doushisha but open to students from all Kyouto universities. I really can't decide what I think of Doushisha. On the one hand, the campus is rad, the quality of the education is presumably very high, it has cachet in spades, and it was founded by a retired goddamn samurai. On the other hand, rich kids. I found the location with no difficulties, but nobody was there by the time I arrived. Of course I was two hours late, so I didn't expect much. I consoled myself by wiling away another couple of hours downtown, because that's my area.

But seriously, tourists. I'm just gonna put this one the line, get the fuck out of Kiyamachi. There is nothing for you here. Nobody wants you here. Take a look at Kawaramachi and head towards the light. Stay away from the shadows. They will not treat you well. You're going to end up robbed, either in the street or in the shops, and probably also get murdered, just for good measure. No but seriously though, stop taking up three times as much space as necessary and being really loud and obnoxious, ok? Please please please. And I'm actually being serious, stay out of Kiyamachi. Locals only. Plus you're all really annoying.

Korean in Japanese

I've wanted to visit Korea for years. There's a story that goes with that, but let's just say it involves a Korean girl and really it's not too hard to work out the rest. I've never been too interested in learning the language – it wasn't offered at my Canadian university, and all my self-study energy goes towards Japanese – but I was kind of forced to change my attitude when I thought I might be going to Busan, where I would naturally take classes as part of the package. Jumping ahead a bit, when I first moved into this dorm I kind of noticed that, oh hey, everybody here speaks English, and they speak their native language, and they're learning Japanese, and some of them speak other second languages as well. And that made me feel kind of embarrassed with my wimpy two languages, even if they're both comparatively advanced.

But still, I thought, I'd like to add another trick to my bag. Speaking Japanese is a pretty rare and impressive skill in Canada; in Japan, less so. I'd really like a little something to bust out when I feel like impressing Japanese people. I should take Korean here! So that's what I'm doing, and I think it's going to be hilarious, because Busan is basically the Oosaka of Korea, so I'll be trying to learn the Busan dialect on my own time. In other words, I'll be a white guy, speaking Korean, in the Busan dialect, with a Japanese accent. With any luck I'll confuse the shit out of people.

My first class was this morning, and I thought it would be fascinating to learn Korean in Japanese. It would be eye-opening; it would re-frame my language faculties; it would not only give me new insight into the process of learning Japanese, but language-learning in general. So far this hasn't happened, but it was only the first class, so maybe I'll strike an epiphany later in the semester. Today we just talked about the syntactical similarities between Japanese and Korean, and how words are constructed in hangul, some of which I already knew by osmosis from deeply trolling the K-blogosphere. I was, thankfully, able to keep up with the explanation without problems, perhaps in part because I've deliberately chosen the least serious class available, 「楽しく学ぶ韓国朝鮮語」、which manages to imply that the other Korean classes are not enjoyable while simultaneously sounding very stupid.

Next I had History of Japanese Thought, with the same teacher as last semester, except now it's the other half of the course. The first half, in fact. Whatever, you don't really have to take them in order. Even without Philosophy and Hikikomori Girl to lean on, I kept up with the lecture and was moved to contemplation at all the right moments. My reading has even improved in the last few months, so although it will be some time before I'm able to casually read through printouts of of hundred-year-old documents, I was able to follow along much more easily than I once was. Getting better!

In both classes, I got a comment from the teacher and a couple of double-takes, but otherwise went unacknowledged. Not like yesterday, when a couple of girls caught sight of me and almost had a heart attack. I like it. I see the other koukan ryuugakusei moving about the campus in groups, while I cut a lone path, because I've got my own stuff to deal with, of which they have no part. I wondered if that made me an arrogant prick, and then I decided that I don't care. It makes me feel more strongly a part of the society in which I live. It makes me feel like I've arrived in a whole new way.

My third academic class of the semester was choukai, which, as far as I'm concerned, is kind of a joke. It's just sort of a lame concept for a class, and the fact that last semester I put by far the least effort into choukai but got an A in that and a B in everything else should tell you what a waste of time it is. I guess maybe it'll help me understand my real classes more effectively, though, which would be pretty damn exciting, I must admit. I can also justify it to myself by saying that the latest reports put choukai as the most critical part of the modern JLPT, which I'm hoping to take in the summer. Although the real reason is that I have to take at least four Japanese language classes and nothing else fit with my schedule.

Finally, Literature again. Same as before, contemporary short stories, taught in English, with class time focussing on discussion. I seem to remember this being an awfully work-intensive course, and having it does not help my degree in any way whatsoever. But it was fun, the teacher was interesting, and besides, I really wanna up my knowledge of Japanese literature, just cause it seems like that's the sort of thing I should have.

First day back

After such a long break, I am good and ready to get back in school. To continue down the road of self-improvement. To throw myself at as big a workload as possible. I always feel like this on the first day of classes, and I always stop after a week or so.

I opened with a bit of a heart-palpitater. Having graduated from the “General” Japanese classes intended for reciprocal exchange students, I've now advanced to those built around the needs of actual Japanese majors. We are no longer mere hobbyists, but language students! Well, actually, this first class contained only six of us, none of us Japanese majors, but that doesn't change the difficulty level. The only girl remaining from my previous adventures is a tiny Chinese girl; I felt like we'd classed up, receiving a huge stat boost, more detailed clothes, and possibly the ability to use a second type of weapon. Self-doubt gnawed at me even so, but I reminded myself that I questioned my abilities at the beginning of last semester too, and that turned out ok.

In fact, relative to the progress we have made this should actually be easier, as the spring classes are naturally a fair measure easier than the same classes in fall. This one is called “Speaking and Listening,” which, if I'm not mistaken, is actually what we've been doing in every single class up to this point, but I guess this time we're going to be learning to do it in a more formal, organized manner. Specifically we'll pretty much be learning how co-workers of roughly equal seniority would hold a business meeting, the usefulness of which should be obvious. Unfortunately we will not be practising workplace presentations, but eh.

Next I had my first “real” class of the semester, 哲学の世界、undoubtedly the stupidest name that has ever been given to any philosophy class ever. Scanning the course outline, I was quite pleased. One to two classes devoted to subjects like epistemology, morality, ontology, and humanity. Pretty standard, introductory stuff, and, in all likelihood, basically a repeat of my first year of university, except now in not my native language. This teacher, a decrepit old guy with a passion for philosophy but fundamental confusion over most other aspects of the world around him, even delivered the same explanation of philo sophia that I got in my first university lecture ever. And it was at this point that I realised a large portion of this course was likely to focus on the Greeks, which is terrible, because the Greeks are the most boring goddamn part of all of philosophy.

But then he started moving into an explanation of how philosophy also has deep roots in India and China, and apparently we'll be getting into that in future classes. Which is good for me, since I've never actually had the opportunity to study Eastern Philosophy, I guess because Western academia considers the entire branch to be a crock of foreign mysticism (what, like Socrates fucking isn't?). Since the whole point of taking this class, besides trying to tidy up my degree, is to help prepare myself for the language and thinking that Japanese people use when they talk about philosophy, it should be especially useful to get a more solid grounding in the deeper roots of Japanese Philosophy in particular.

Then kind of a funny thing happened. Do you remember back when you were first learning to ride a bike? At first, you must have had somebody with their hands on the back, teaching you how to balance. Then eventually one time they let go, and run beside you for a bit, and then stop, and yell after you, and then holy shit I am riding a bike. At this point you either take it and run with it, so to speak, or you suddenly become overly conscious of what you're doing and fall. Basically this is what happened to me. I was sitting there, listening to the lecture, duly taking notes, everything was Jake. But then I realised that holy shit I've been following this for over an hour. And then I became overly conscious of my listening comprehension, suddenly trying to hang onto every word, and just like that the ordered flow of the teacher's voice melted into one continuous slur of complex syntax and vocabulary I haven't learned. I've had this happen before; luckily I knew that I just had to relax my grip a bit. Like falling asleep.

When I located my final class of the day, I thought I must have got the wrong room. Mainly because it was filled with Chinese people. Oh, and one Viet Namese girl. Who spoke Chinese. And already seemed to know everybody. Nope, I was in the right place – I was just in with the gakubu students. The ones who stay here for four years...studying nothing but Japanese language, all day, every day. So these, I thought, are the hardcore kids. I've never understood majoring in a language, like how is that even a thing? I can think of no rational reason why it shouldn't be, but still. I half-expected those assembled to start pointing and whispering towards the stranger in their midst. Instead, a mere handful of them simply glanced up, and then kept on Chineseing, which was somehow worse.

I sat in awkward silence, slightly away from the main cluster of tables, as if to draw further attention to the fact that I was the only white person in the room. You'd think that wouldn't be so jarring for me at this point. The truth is, although I'm in my element among the Japanese – I ought to be, after basically spending half my life among them, to various degrees – as soon as I was hit with a crowd of 20 Chinese, I felt a gap. Not an intentional one on their part; just one I didn't quite know how to bridge the way I do with Japanese people, and it had nothing to do with language.

But, as it turns out, the group mostly arrived together and have been working and growing together, and as a result they've developed into a casual, friendly group. Everybody was relaxed and funny. Except for one guy who tried to speak to me in English, presumably because white people don't speak Japanese even though he'd already heard me do it, but fuck that guy. And what's better? When we had a class discussion, everybody seemed to know what the fuck they were talking about. I've never had that happen. Hardcore, it turns out, is knowing your shit. Well. Except for Kansai-ben, which they all evidently think is this hilarious pidgin Japanese that fictional people speak, and I guarantee you none of them can speak it. Anyway I'll bust it out on them eventually and then they'll see.

Oh yeah, incidentally, the class is about writing papers. Academic language and what is appropriate for written communication versus spoken communication. Should prove very useful in grad school, to say the least, as well as, really, my entire future.

Oh, and also there is some lone white guy stalking around campus. I must've passed him on the footpath two or three times now. He doesn't live at the dorm, but he's simply too young to be a teacher. No one knows who he is, and no one else claims to have seen him. I fear that he is actually a ghost, the tortured remnant of some ryuugakusei from decades ago who died on campus, and the fact that he has appeared to me means that my time grows short, for one dark night when I'm walking home alone he will pounce upon me and drag me down into the abyss with him. I'm going with this theory because the alternative would be a European who is as good as or better at Japanese than I am, a far more terrifying possibility.