Yakyuu.. Baseball!

I finally gathered enough courage to join a club here at university. I have played tennis all my life and, while it can be a fun sport, it gets old after a while – to me anyway – so the tennis club was not an option. I’ve watched countless Japanese movies, dramas and animes and in plenty of those baseball plays an important role in high school life. I’m the kind of person who likes hitting, throwing and chasing balls so baseball struck me as the perfect sport to pursue here in Japan, where baseball probably is the most popular sport in the country.

I’ve watched the baseball club’s training a couple of times from my balcony and was impressed at the speeds and accuracy they achieved throwing the ball.. to the extent of feeling depressed about the idea of ruining their practice with my noviceness. However, I told my class mate, who is a manager in the club, that I wouldn’t mind trying baseball if I got the chance. She then asked the captain if it was okay for me to join and a week later I went to practice to check it out!

When I first got there I felt so nervous and out of place because, well.. I was wearing lame jogging slacks and a normal windbreaker, with a hint of running shoes virtually useless on dirt ground. To top that off, apart from my classmate, I’m the only foreigner participating and my Japanese is terrible. It turned out, though, that everyone was really nice and they gave their best to make me feel welcome.

First up on the menu was running 5 laps, followed by sprinting and general exercises. Not having done sports in years, they already got me with the running. But I gave it my best and in the end (sort of) managed to keep up with practice, though looking clumsy and definitely not baseballer-like most of the time. After exerting ourselves, we practed fielding and batting. I was terrible at judging the ball path at first, but towards the end I got used to it and one time even managed to make it look like a regular play, albeit a slow one. As far as batting is concerned, I have little problem hitting the ball. My biggest concern here is the batting stance and distribution of weight during the swing, which I just cannot quite wrap my head around.

After fielding and batting we played consecutive catch games that finally gave me the last push onto my knees. Once practice was over, everyone went for food together and the team treated me to lunch. They are a great bunch and I hope I will be able to stay with them until I leave Japan.

Oh yeah, and Tatsu went shopping with me to get some baseball stuff:

Only missing spikes and a massively expensive baseball glove!

Bank Notes

While I was in Yanasegawa last year, I came across something interesting in a Familymart. I withdrew 4,000 yen from an ATM and to my surprise the sum was presented to me in.. 2 notes! Until then I thought Japanese bank notes were limited to 1,000 5,000 and 10,000 notes but it turns out 2,000 notes exist as well. I wasn’t too sure at first if it was real money, to be honest, so I spent my first 2,000 note in mentioned konbini straight away to confirm its validity. After successfully buying my drink with it I felt a bit stupid as surely no ATM would happily hand out monopoly money in the first place.

And so, I decided to keep the second note until I leave Japan. This turned out to be a good idea, as Hyun-Hee (sorry if I misspell your name >_>) explained to me, because apparently these notes are rare and are said to bring the owner luck. Yay! A couple of days later I proudly showed Tatsu my note and he said there existed another rare-ish note: 100 yen. Tatsu works part-time at a konbini so he said he’d check the register for me next time he went to work. Sure enough, next time I saw him we traded two 100 coins for two notes!

So here they are, my monetary all star team! (well, duo):

Look at these bad boys

Yen has never been this sexy.

Old Year, New Year

This entry is a bit late, but when aren’t they. 2009 has passed and we now live in the future: 2010. Let me try a straight off the top of my head review:

• Manchester life
• Oberursel life
• Manchester life
• Oberursel life
• Milton Keynes life
• Oxford, PA life
• Milton Keynes  life
• Katsu kare

Add in a bit of university, a depressing Christmas and an uneventful New Year’s Eve and you’ve got the essence of what I felt about 2009. Of course there were countless highlights, but the dragging of time has dominated last year mostly. Coming to Japan this changed at first to the total opposite, but daily life has set in and the novelty of being in this country has disappeared.

With that out of the way, I have enjoyed these past 12 days so far doing mostly nothing but sleeping, watching anime and playing games. The few times I didn’t was when Kat and I met up with Mariya and Jesse for お節（osechi, food served during the New Year’sHolidays) at Mariya’s grandparents’ house somewhere in Chiba.. I think. I also had ramen from a proper street vendor for the first time, so I can tick that off  on my Japan todo list! Next on the list would be leaving the Tokyo area for the first time which was actually planned for this week. However, the Japan Rail representative at a station misinformed Tom about the deadline to buy the 青春十八切符(seishunjuuhachikippu, lit. Youth 18 Ticket), so our trip to Nagoya and Kobe fell flat. I’m pondering going to the Zoo or Yokohama instead this week-end….. or maybe BOTH.

Anyhow, apart from New Year and Mariya and Jesse’s visit, not much really happened. It was a good opportunity to recharge my batteries and the sleepins will be missed.

Christmas in Yanasegawa

On the 25th of December, Kat and I ventured out to 柳瀬川(Yanasegawa) which is part of Tokyo. The distance itself is not that great, but the train connection is slightly odd: 4 lines, 3 transfers and 3 different train companies. Roughly 1 hour and only 760 yen later, we arrived in Yanasegawa and were picked up by Mariya’s grandfather and taken to the nearby store called Summit, where Mariya, Jesse and Mariya’s mum and brother were shopping.

Once we got to Mariya’s grandparents house, we sat down, had a little talk and were suddenly surprised by a truckload of Christmas gifts from everyone. I was so surprised! They were gifts from the family and from Kat’s mum. We spent the rest of the day sitting at the table chatting away, a good part of which was in Japanese. The grandparents are so lovely, I was so amazed! They made a big effort to make us feel at home, comfortable and to involve us in conversations. Kat and I both truly appreciated their kindness and openheartedness that was so rare to find even in the past few days before and during Christmas.

That evening we went to bed before midnight, so Kat, Mariya, Jesse and me played a couple of games we found in the room: かるた, Fang den Hut, and Packesel. We had so much fun we lost track of time and went to bed around 2:30am.

The next day we sat together again, had our lunch and then headed out on our way back to Tama. It was so sad to say goodbye to everyone, and especially to the grandparents as they have been so great to us, giving us various home grown/made things to take home with us. Mariya and Jesse will be here until just after new year, so we will definitely get to see them again.

Before we headed to the trains, Kat and I succumbed to the cheap prices in Summit. Kat got a truck load of cheap clothing while I looted the 100 yen shop and bought 2 long sleeve shirts (290 yen each) and a huge sweatshirt (1199 yen). Bargains! I was especially happy that each one of those clothing items had weird English on it that made me laugh such as “PERFECT INANE – That fell on the way, later to wake from the trance. And let life’s pursuit put them in a twisted stance?  – GRAND HONORABLE HIGH SOLDIER”. Super cool.

Christmas Days

Just like expected, nothing happens on Christmas here in Japan. While Christmas paraphernalia sales boom, on the actual day(s) Christmas cannot be felt. The only feelable change is that apparently loads of restaurants were booked out, KFC being one of the most popular (don’t ask), because Christmas is a couples thing here.

Anyhow, after celebrating Tom’s and my birthday, the 22nd of December was a celebration of freedom from class for the coming 3 weeks. That evening, Tom hosted a burger party in his room and it ended up being packed with roughly 10 people. The day after that was supposed to be Kat, Tom and my day in with lots of cooking, eating and movies, but we all slept in too long and didn’t get shopping and other things out of the way until it got very late in the afternoon. I was a bit disappointed that it ended up in just cooking dinner together and watching a few movies with the others.

I spent the 24th of December, which is traditionally the most important day, well evening, in Germany, I spent with Kat waiting for it to pass.. slightly depressing. Then again the outlook of the following day kept me going. This shall be explained… in the following post!

Christmas (no, not Xmas.)

It’s Christmas time even here in Japan, where I believe Christianity is not too common. (1-3% if I recall Ian’s lectures correctly?) In the end it’s just like in most countries in the World where it’s celebrated: commerce. I really dislike seeing Santa Claus & Co. everywhere I go, but no mention or depiction of Jesus anywhere to be found. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not particularly interested in religion in that way, it’s just that the reason for Christmas is, well, Jesus Christ’s birth and thus the name of the day. It just seems odd that because the religious explanation doesn’t sell well, Santa Claus was invented and now celebrated instead.

Anyway, enough complaining. I bought Christmas lights!

1500 yen at Donki!

They make for a great atmosphere, very soothing. I might get one or two more Christmas ornaments, but it would be a waste of money to get too many things, as they can be used only for a couple of days and will be thrown away once I leave Japan.

Tom, Kat and I were talking about making it all homely and Christmassy so that we can get together one of these days and spend a whole day in: watching movies, listening to Christmas songs, eating sweets and a nice meal. Personally, I would love to do this on the 24th as it’s tradition in Germany, but Tom already has plans, and Kat and I have plans for the 25th. I wonder if and what day we will turn our hope of a great, festive day into reality?

Mid-Term Exams

On Monday we had our mid-term exams in Integrated Japanese 401 and Kanji 902. I spent less days studying that originally planned, but in those two days of study I only stopped for food and bathroom. As a result, the exams went seemingly well. We received our results for 401 yesterday and I got 80%, which is 20% above passing and, obviously, 20% below aceing the exam. I’m not too sure whether this is considered a good result or not, but, relating it to the feeling I had when class first started and thought it was too difficult for me, I’m quite happy. The only depressing thing about the exam was that ONE page where I apparently failed hard: 1 out of 12 points, haha. OTL

902 results will be announced on Monday, but I’m pretty sure it’ll be around the same percentage.

Luxury Of Illness, Dr. Speedy Gonzalez

So I suddenly got ill Tuesday midnight 2 weeks ago. I’m not sure to this day what exactly it was. I suddenly felt really weak and left a gathering to go to bed. That whole night I had a high fever and started to develop symptoms I later found out perfectly match the flu. Now, with all this swine flu hype going on at the moment, my first reaction was obviously: “Oh no.” The next day I was sent to a clinic to get checked. It was a tiny clinic close to the university; maybe 5 minutes walk away. After signing up for clinic membership (yay in English!) and waiting a short while, my temperature was taken. 6 times. The first couple of times it displayed 39°C so the nurse thought that can’t be right, as I was clearly looking half-well and not dead. With a different thermometer it showed 35°C. Hrm. Two more times later it displayed I think 38°C so she thought that was appropriate enough for her liking. After this adventure, I got taken to the doctor, who checked my heart beat at about 15 different points at a rate of  0.5 seconds per place. After that he said something Japanese I didn’t understand which according to the the nurse translates into “not flu, cold”. 2500 yen later I was free to go home and rest.

I informed the Foreign Affairs Office here at TUFS of what happened and they said to rest until I feel better, and that because it’s not swine flu, I’m not excused, so every day of rest is marked as absent. Great. Let’s see my attendance requirement to complete my Japanese language class is 80%, so 4 out of 5 days, I’ve been here almost 8 weeks, so I get to miss 8 days…… right, OK that’ll work out. Just can’t afford the luxury of being ill again.

In total I missed 5 days of class, so it wasn’t too bad. My tutor helped me during this time to think of ways to get those 5 days attendance loss back, including going to a different clinic, but that would have involved more time, effort, money and nerves lost. Sigh.

Shuukatsu

At the moment, most of my friends are active in 就活 (Shuukatsu), a short form of 就職活動 (Shuushoku Katsudou), which basically means job hunting. I always had a hunch that finding employment here in Japan, and especially in Tokyo, would be somewhat of a tedious, formality loaded process. But judging from what my friends tell me, it sounds nearly impossible to show employers what one’s got. If it’s a major company like Sony or Mizuho we’re talking about, employment tests are held with maybe a couple hundred or thousand people at a time. I’m not sure if that involves interviews, but even if it did, there would be no time to positively distinguish oneself from others with formalities taking up all of the time and everyone dressed exactly the same. Here’s a picture of such a meeting a friend took:

Job application in.. Tokyo?

Japanese Communication Realizations

Before I came to Japan, I was aware of conversation procedures in a Japanese conversation. They’re not much different from what I’m used to, except for something called 相づち (Aizuchi). Performing Aizuchi basically means while someone else talks, you make gestures, say certain phrases or even just make sounds to make sure that the speaker knows you’re listening and appreciating what he’s saying. While this sort of behaviour can be found even in Germany or the USA, it’s by far not as strong and annoying as here in Japan.

I’m not saying that loudly agreeing with me while I speak or constant nodding is annoying, it’s just the fact that 80% of the time people do it because it’s the norm, and not because they mean it. If I feel close enough to a person to talk about things in Japanese, that feeling is destroyed by impersonal Aizuchi.

A second thing I realized about Japanese is intonation. Before this one fateful language class, I was 100% sure that with Japanese, intonation was not as important as it was in, say, China. However, in class we learned about the history of Kanji and how if it weren’t for them, written communication would be a mess. Japanese possesses many words that are spelled exactly the same, but are written in different Kanji to differentiate. However, this is obviously not possible to do in conversations, as Kanji are written and not spoken. Thus, these words with same spelling are pronounced the same. Up until recently, I thought it meant that I would have to understand the meaning of those words by context, but our teacher explained that words with same spelling have different intonations. However, there are also plenty words that don’t. Hrm. So this leaves me wondering if it’s worth learning the intonations along with vocabulary, or if learning it comes natural?

Example: These words are all pronounced ようじ (youji)