Yesterday's post, continued

Come now, you didn't honestly think that my rants about the difficulty of Japanese would be the only thing to commemorate my 6 weeks here, did you? There are other, non-academic-type topics to discuss. The first and most important topic being the new students that have joined my class since I last described my classmates 2 weeks ago.

Initially, we had 4 new students: Dale, Albert, Robert, and Chin. Robert, a 23-year-old African-American from LA, had not passed the test to move on, and was bumped back to our class. However, he quickly retook and passed said test (which, incidentally, I have also now passed), and moved out of our class within a few days. The rest stayed, however.

Dale is also a 23 year old American, from Colorado. Dale is half-Japanese and majored in Japanese at Colorado University. Incidentally, he was also a fencer. Though he (basically) understands the language, his speaking is not so good, so he is with us. This is not a problem for me, as he is a great guy, and spends a lot of time with Christian and myself. He is the only one besides Christian and I with perfect Movie Night attendance, and also went to the Wii expo with me. The other day, he was with me and Chris when we explored a traditional-looking Japanese restaurant. Here, we ordered beef and chicken, which the chef told us would be fresh. Turns out fresh me raw. That was no problem for us, since we are men and ate it all. With a sweet soy sauce, it was actually quite good. Also worth noting is that Dale is happily married, something he accomplished right after college. This really surprised our teacher, which made for an amusing 5 minutes the other day.

Albert is a 22-year-old Carnegie Mellon student who hails from Korea but did high school in California. He has attended Yamasa before, but came back because he wanted to learn more. A generally high-spirited fellow, Albert only comes to class every other day or so, since he goes out drinking every with his Korean friends who were about leave, and his roommate snores too loudly for him to fall asleep. However, when he is at school, he is a lot of fun to hang out with, and he always comes with us to the Magical Udon Restaurant of Joy and Rainbows and General Happiness. I'm fairly certain that he and Dale are both at Yamasa until Christmas, like me.

Chin is from Taiwan, and I know she is a 30-year-old nurse, but that is about all I know. Damn language barriers. She seems nice, though. Oh, now that I am thinking of it, Oo-san, the original Chinese girl from our class, opted to drop down a class, because she is having trouble keeping up. Sayoonara, Oo-san, you always liked to laugh a lot (actually that sounds to permanent-farewell-ish. I see her everyday across the hall).

On friday, a new SILAC session brought new students, the australians Colleen and Anthea. They looked about my age, but not much older, so I figured they were taking a year off, since 18 is the minimum age for Yamasa, or 16 if you are intermediate (which we are not). Imagine my surprise, then, to learn that they were both 15 (though Colleen is about to turn 16). Apparently they were allowed in cause they are on some manner of exchange program, scheduled to go to a different place in Nihon, but, in Anthea's words "someone died there," so they were sent here instead. Huh.

As far as the rest of life is concerned, things are going quite well, as far as I can tell. I don't opt to go to Nagoya all the time and hardcore party at the clubs, like some students to, although we do have an event tentatively planned for tomorrow. For the most part, I just try to relax when I am not cramming language into my brain, and get out to try and speak Japanese, which is an awfully slow process right now.

Japan is starting have noticeable influences on me, too. I am now accustomed to saying "hai" instead of "yes," "sou desuka" and instead "I see," "daijoubu desu" instead of "it's ok," and other mannerisms like that. Every movie night, we watch at least one Japanese film. Japanese films are really quite different, since the way the Japanese display (or rather don't display) emotions is quite different from the Western customs, and Japanese filmmakers tend to spend as much time focusing on natural beauty as they do on plot. This makes the movies quite odd at first, but once you get used to it, it's quite a beautiful thing. We watched a movie called "April Story" the other day, which was a short 65 minutes, but was an excellent Japanese film, and I could understand a lot of it, which excited me. It's from the same director as "Love Letter" which I have described in a previous entry, and is not available in the US, so I will make an effort to find a subtitled version to take home with me.

Even the music here is growing on me. J-pop, often laughed at in America, deserves to be laughed at, because it is stupid. However, there are some popular Japanese artits that don't fit into the traditional J-Pop genre. Most notably is the mega-popular Shiina Ringo, who has songs from just about every possible genre of music. Therefore, she has songs that I don't really care for but, at the same time, many songs that I do. Her voice threw me off at first, but I've quickly come to love it. She is an extremely talented musician, writing, arranging, and singing all of her material. The CD that grabbed my attention is called "Karuku Samen Kuri no Hana" (literally "Chalk, Semen, Chestunut Flowers." Yay Japanese!), which struck at first for being so different and intersting, but distinctively odd and Japanese sounding. Since then, it has grown to be pretty much wholly amazing, a beautiful CD that has a sort of hypnotic effect over me, even if the lyrics are in super-old-fashioned Japanese that I will only understand with years of specialized study. I have since then snatched up much of her other work, none of which is as good as the CD I just described, but all of which grows on me with each listen.

Alright, it's late-o-clock, and I'm not sure if I'm supposed to study chapter 22 or 23, since nothing was explicitly made clear, but I shall memorize the massive chapter 23 vocab list and hope for the best. Oyasumi.