I'm having a harder time than usual getting over my jetlag, and I'm reluctant to write too much in here until I'm more coherent, but two smallish things have been tickling my brain and making me feel writey:
Packaging in Japan is completely out of control. For lunch today I bought two rolls. At the counter, the lady put each roll in its own separate plastic baggy, then put the two plastic baggies in another plastic baggy. And everything is like that - candy is individually wrapped. Ritz Crackers tubes contain five-cracker mini-tubes. Give Japan another ten years, they'll invent a nano-condom that individually wraps the sperm.
And there is this: Someone once referred to "the soft bigotry of low expectations," and more than anything that is the form of racism that one experiences as a conspicuous foreigner in Japan. This has given rise to what my friends and I in Kyoto used to refer to as "playing the Gaijin card." This refers to any time we would accentuate our accents or even pretend to speak no Japanese at all simply to get away with something on account of our foreignness. My favorite example was a guy I knew from Seattle who had the testicular fortitude to demand film admission at the child's price every weekend under the pretense that he didn't realize he didn't qualify for that kind of ticket, until the staff heard him speaking accent-free to his Japanese wife on his cell.
There's no common thread here, and no point. Just my brain juice, leaking all over Teh Intarwebz.
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Friday, September 26, 2008
It's the smell!
I'm staying with a fellow Japanologist friend here in Tokyo, and she asked me last night, jokingly, if I could smell the difference now that I was in Japan. The thing is, walking around this morning, I really could. It smells like tatami here - a musty, vegetable smell that I'm sure is the effect of the persistent humidity.
That smell, more than anything else, makes me feel like I'm back. For the last four years, returning to Japan has been my constant, though sometimes distant, goal. I didn't really remember how much I love it here, though, until this morning. The colors, the shapes of the houses, the bowing, the constant press of new kanji, new words, new ideas. I feel alive here.
A woman walking her dog came toward me as I walked down a typical Japanese residential street - narrow enough to stretch your body across but intended nonetheless for bidirectional auto traffic. No, I don't understand how they do that - I think physics must work differently here. Her dog found me inexplicably fascinating. Maybe he's never seen a guy with long blond hair? In any case, he trotted toward me, freezing just out of arm's reach. I reached my hand out, he startled and ran away to his owner, who bowed to me and wished me a good morning.
It was a perfectly normal thing, this encounter, but it was magical. Because it was in Japan. Because I'm in Japan. And because fatigue poisons can rot your brain, leaving the dying wreckage of your intellect just staring at the whole world, going "dude.... cool."
That smell, more than anything else, makes me feel like I'm back. For the last four years, returning to Japan has been my constant, though sometimes distant, goal. I didn't really remember how much I love it here, though, until this morning. The colors, the shapes of the houses, the bowing, the constant press of new kanji, new words, new ideas. I feel alive here.
A woman walking her dog came toward me as I walked down a typical Japanese residential street - narrow enough to stretch your body across but intended nonetheless for bidirectional auto traffic. No, I don't understand how they do that - I think physics must work differently here. Her dog found me inexplicably fascinating. Maybe he's never seen a guy with long blond hair? In any case, he trotted toward me, freezing just out of arm's reach. I reached my hand out, he startled and ran away to his owner, who bowed to me and wished me a good morning.
It was a perfectly normal thing, this encounter, but it was magical. Because it was in Japan. Because I'm in Japan. And because fatigue poisons can rot your brain, leaving the dying wreckage of your intellect just staring at the whole world, going "dude.... cool."
My first Japanese sunrise
Four o'clock. That's when my brain decided it was time for me to get up and moving this morning. Four o'clock. It's enough to make a man jab a stick in there or something just to enforce some discipline...
I've just returned from a walk around the neighborhood. The Benjamin arriving in Japan this time around is a very different man than the one who took his first steps in a foreign land back in March of 2003. Then, I also awoke early my first morning and went for a quick walk around the block - four hours later I found my apartment again. Five years and a lot of experience later, I know how to make my crippled brain do something similar to navigating. I walk away from the apartment, note what's on every corner, then walk back. Once I've done that in every direction, I can start turning once or twice at intersections, then retracing my steps. It's painstaking, but I've learned that this is pretty much the only way I can find a place.
Especially in Japan. Neighborhood streets here have no names, and the house numbers are assigned (I have been told) according to the order in which building permits are issued city wide. If you invite someone to your home in Japan, it is customary to draw a map at least from the nearest street large enough to have a name. You have to file such a map with the emergency services, also, so that they can find your home in an emergency. Presumably they use GPS now, but when I registered my address in Kyoto the hand-drawn maps were still a requirement.
I've just returned from a walk around the neighborhood. The Benjamin arriving in Japan this time around is a very different man than the one who took his first steps in a foreign land back in March of 2003. Then, I also awoke early my first morning and went for a quick walk around the block - four hours later I found my apartment again. Five years and a lot of experience later, I know how to make my crippled brain do something similar to navigating. I walk away from the apartment, note what's on every corner, then walk back. Once I've done that in every direction, I can start turning once or twice at intersections, then retracing my steps. It's painstaking, but I've learned that this is pretty much the only way I can find a place.
Especially in Japan. Neighborhood streets here have no names, and the house numbers are assigned (I have been told) according to the order in which building permits are issued city wide. If you invite someone to your home in Japan, it is customary to draw a map at least from the nearest street large enough to have a name. You have to file such a map with the emergency services, also, so that they can find your home in an emergency. Presumably they use GPS now, but when I registered my address in Kyoto the hand-drawn maps were still a requirement.
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Arrival
I arrived in Japan in the usual number of pieces (for those keeping track, the usual number is one). It's amazing to be here again - everything is just the same. I can read far, far more Japanese than I could when I left, which is a pleasant surprise. I've spent the last four years fairly steadily producing and learning flashcards, but this is the first I've had a feeling that that had actually acomplished something for me.
When I first arrived in Germany back in 2005, I was immediately taken to a rock concert. The band, Torf Rock, sings covers of American classic rock songs with lyrics sung in the Platt dialect about Viking adventures. Evidently, this is part of a theme in my life, because as soon as I arrived here I was taken to a Brazilian combination all-you-can-eat and all-you-can-drink place to spend four hours basically just discovering everything you can do with a cow. It turns out, you can do a lot, all of it delicious.
When I first arrived in Germany back in 2005, I was immediately taken to a rock concert. The band, Torf Rock, sings covers of American classic rock songs with lyrics sung in the Platt dialect about Viking adventures. Evidently, this is part of a theme in my life, because as soon as I arrived here I was taken to a Brazilian combination all-you-can-eat and all-you-can-drink place to spend four hours basically just discovering everything you can do with a cow. It turns out, you can do a lot, all of it delicious.
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Sayonara, Germany
The day I've worked so long for has finally arrived. For four years I've been looking forward to finally returning to Japan, and in three hours I'll be on my plane.
My first week will be spent at a friend's place in Tokyo. After that I'll move to Chiba, where I'll take up residence in a (probably tiny, but subsidised!) student apartment until the end of January.
It's hard for me to leave Germany, of course. When I got here I was just an exchange student with a German girlfriend, but now I have a wife, a home, the beginning of a career. I'm so, so excited, though, to finally return to Japan, to speak and read and hear and eat and dream Japanese without pause.
I'm ridiculously nervous today. I've had disasters in the past - I've missed planes, forgotten my passport, taken the subway the wrong way for two hours before realizing that I wasn't on the way to the airport. I've checked five times this morning that I really do have my passport in my suitcase, and my wife has just reminded me to make sure I take my suitcase with me. Which sounds funny, but I've forgotten things like that before.
Hopefully, though, everything will go well, and you will hear from me next from Tokyo. Wish me smooth skies!
My first week will be spent at a friend's place in Tokyo. After that I'll move to Chiba, where I'll take up residence in a (probably tiny, but subsidised!) student apartment until the end of January.
It's hard for me to leave Germany, of course. When I got here I was just an exchange student with a German girlfriend, but now I have a wife, a home, the beginning of a career. I'm so, so excited, though, to finally return to Japan, to speak and read and hear and eat and dream Japanese without pause.
I'm ridiculously nervous today. I've had disasters in the past - I've missed planes, forgotten my passport, taken the subway the wrong way for two hours before realizing that I wasn't on the way to the airport. I've checked five times this morning that I really do have my passport in my suitcase, and my wife has just reminded me to make sure I take my suitcase with me. Which sounds funny, but I've forgotten things like that before.
Hopefully, though, everything will go well, and you will hear from me next from Tokyo. Wish me smooth skies!
Saturday, September 13, 2008
Important attributes
This is really just a randomly selected example, but why is it so common for every mention of a person in a news article followed by a mention of that person's age? Is it really impossible to understand a reference to a human being without know how old that human being is? Could we try it with some other randomly selected attribute?
Until Palin, who has a vagina, joined him on the campaign trail, McCain, who has a penis, had limited his political events to smaller town hall meetings and rallies of a few hundred people. His Democratic rival, Barack Obama, an Illinois senator, routinely draws thousands of people to his speeches, a phenomenon McCain has tried to use to his advantage by labeling Obama, who like McCain has a penis, a celebrity.
The purchase of a design is a fascinating process. An interested customer sits down on one side of the table while the designer (and his hard-working assistant) stands opposite. The designs, printed on 69cm paper squares in our case, are removed one at a time from the top of a stack, revealing a new explosion of shape and color every two seconds or so.
As the customer sees designs they* would like to turn into a bedspread, wallpaper, purse or (for all I know) designer condom, these are set aside into a separate stack that can sometimes end up numbering thirty or forty prints. This smaller stack is then recursively reduced, in a process reminiscent of distillation.
The next step, psychologically, is by far the most fascinating. The customer asks what the prints cost. I, knowing full well what the prints cost, ask Mineeda-san in Japanese what the prints cost. He, knowing full well what the prints cost, furrows his brow, looks the customers over, considers in his invoice book, counts the number of designs, and quotes a price that no one has ever, ever paid for a design. The customer, deeply shocked, looks the prints over a second time, shaking their heads in utter disbelief, and counters by quoting the price of the hamburger they had for lunch (this isn't totally unreasonable, actually - a hamburger at a trade fair costs so much you'd expect it to come with fries, a milkshake and a Porsche). My boss laughs out loud, and says "no, no, no." This is one of his three English phrases, the others being "no English" and "receipt please." What can I say; the man follows the advice of his accountant religiously.
Eventually, a price is reached which neither side is particularly happy about. Money - enough to buy a small car if only a few designs are involved, enough to buy a small house (I am not exaggerating) in the case of a particularly large purchase - changes hands in the one direction, intellectual property in the other. My boss sits down next to me as the customer walks away, artwork rolled under their arm, and wonders out loud how he can survive accepting such prices. Then the next customer comes along, and the cycle begins anew.
*I hate "he/she", "he or she", "s/he", and every other alternative I know assuming a gender. Also, every sentence should not be written in the passive voice, as this is found to be annoying by me. There are those who propose introducing a new pronoun for indeterminate gender, but we have already had a pretty good one in vernacular English for a really really long time, so those people should get down off their "third person plural" grammatical high horses, bite me, and then join me in embracing this eminently practical device.
As the customer sees designs they* would like to turn into a bedspread, wallpaper, purse or (for all I know) designer condom, these are set aside into a separate stack that can sometimes end up numbering thirty or forty prints. This smaller stack is then recursively reduced, in a process reminiscent of distillation.
The next step, psychologically, is by far the most fascinating. The customer asks what the prints cost. I, knowing full well what the prints cost, ask Mineeda-san in Japanese what the prints cost. He, knowing full well what the prints cost, furrows his brow, looks the customers over, considers in his invoice book, counts the number of designs, and quotes a price that no one has ever, ever paid for a design. The customer, deeply shocked, looks the prints over a second time, shaking their heads in utter disbelief, and counters by quoting the price of the hamburger they had for lunch (this isn't totally unreasonable, actually - a hamburger at a trade fair costs so much you'd expect it to come with fries, a milkshake and a Porsche). My boss laughs out loud, and says "no, no, no." This is one of his three English phrases, the others being "no English" and "receipt please." What can I say; the man follows the advice of his accountant religiously.
Eventually, a price is reached which neither side is particularly happy about. Money - enough to buy a small car if only a few designs are involved, enough to buy a small house (I am not exaggerating) in the case of a particularly large purchase - changes hands in the one direction, intellectual property in the other. My boss sits down next to me as the customer walks away, artwork rolled under their arm, and wonders out loud how he can survive accepting such prices. Then the next customer comes along, and the cycle begins anew.
*I hate "he/she", "he or she", "s/he", and every other alternative I know assuming a gender. Also, every sentence should not be written in the passive voice, as this is found to be annoying by me. There are those who propose introducing a new pronoun for indeterminate gender, but we have already had a pretty good one in vernacular English for a really really long time, so those people should get down off their "third person plural" grammatical high horses, bite me, and then join me in embracing this eminently practical device.
Friday, September 12, 2008
Belgium's multiple personalities
Language defines us as few other attributes can, and few things are harder fought for by the members of a culture than the right to the language that frequently defines them. Nations without unifying languages have even been known to resurrect dead or dying languages (see Irish Gaelic and Israeli Hebrew, respectively), largely in order to create the basis for the communal identity that almost universally exists between speakers of a language or dialect.
The strength of the feelings often held toward language lead to some fascinating behavior in cultures that do not share a single common tongue. In Brussels (a French-speaking island in the midst of Flemish-speaking northern Belgium) it has led to every street in the city having two names. I am currently living in a hostel just off of either Rue Royale or Konigsstraat, depending on which language you speak. If you (like me) have a much better capacity for remembering Dutch words (similar as they are to German) , but your taxi driver only speaks French, then you will simply be unable to convey your address to him, even though you know the name of the street you live on.
It's like there are two Brussels overlaid atop one another. If I take a French taxi, I have to go to Rue Royale - in his universe, Konigsstraat does not exist.
The strength of the feelings often held toward language lead to some fascinating behavior in cultures that do not share a single common tongue. In Brussels (a French-speaking island in the midst of Flemish-speaking northern Belgium) it has led to every street in the city having two names. I am currently living in a hostel just off of either Rue Royale or Konigsstraat, depending on which language you speak. If you (like me) have a much better capacity for remembering Dutch words (similar as they are to German) , but your taxi driver only speaks French, then you will simply be unable to convey your address to him, even though you know the name of the street you live on.
It's like there are two Brussels overlaid atop one another. If I take a French taxi, I have to go to Rue Royale - in his universe, Konigsstraat does not exist.
Arrival in Brussels
I am in Brussels this weekend, working as an interpreter and all-around personal assistant to a design artist from Kyoto. It's fascinating work - there is an entire universe here that I never suspected existed until my first design show. Any time you see a floral wallpaper or a paisley-strewn bed cover, someone had to actually sit down and create that image. A great many of these designs are not actually created for the company that produces the final consumer good by in-house artists, but are rather purchased from freelance designers, and fairs like this one are where the artists and the customers come together.
Here's a fascinating fact for you: To protect the carpeting during setup, the entire floor of the convention center is currently covered with huge cellophane sheets comprising sufficient surface area to keep a sandwich the size of the Empire State Building fresh.
I could eat a sandwich the size of the Empire State Building. I'm starving, and they want €10 (one billion US dollars) for a salad here.
I'll try to break away from time to time to blog my experiences here. Hopefully I'll have a less exciting trip than last year, when the hotel my boss was staying at misplaced €80,000 (one metric fuckton of dollars) worth of his prints and couldn't find them until the last day of the fair. Translating angry Japanese into polite English and angry English into polite Japanese for hours on end ranks way down at the bottom of my happiest lifetime experiences.
Edit: In response to criticism, I have made "billion" italic. Also, I've fixed a few spelling errors and added "fuckton" to my Firefox spell checker's dictionary.
Here's a fascinating fact for you: To protect the carpeting during setup, the entire floor of the convention center is currently covered with huge cellophane sheets comprising sufficient surface area to keep a sandwich the size of the Empire State Building fresh.
I could eat a sandwich the size of the Empire State Building. I'm starving, and they want €10 (one billion US dollars) for a salad here.
I'll try to break away from time to time to blog my experiences here. Hopefully I'll have a less exciting trip than last year, when the hotel my boss was staying at misplaced €80,000 (one metric fuckton of dollars) worth of his prints and couldn't find them until the last day of the fair. Translating angry Japanese into polite English and angry English into polite Japanese for hours on end ranks way down at the bottom of my happiest lifetime experiences.
Edit: In response to criticism, I have made "billion" italic. Also, I've fixed a few spelling errors and added "fuckton" to my Firefox spell checker's dictionary.
Friday, September 5, 2008
The birth of the American Umlaut
Greetings, Internet.
I don't suppose a great many people will ever read this post who aren't already conversant with the basic details of my life, but I'll just throw them up here for posterity, and because that's what you do with the first post of a blog, right?
First, my name: Benjamin Stürmer. I picked up that awesome family name via my recent marriage, and the oddity of being an American with a "ü" in my name is of course the inspiration for this blog's name.
My occupation: I am a Master's Student of Japan Studies at the University of Düsseldorf and work full time as a computer programmer at a medium-large firm that produces human resources management software. I'll be leaving the job behind at the end of this month and spending four months writing my thesis (on the history and identity construction of a minority called the Burakumin) in Chiba, Japan.
My interests: I cycle through quite a variety of hobbies, the majority of them traditional geek pasttimes. I'm finally emerging from a six- or seven-year dark age in terms of video games, and am now trying to play through some of the many great games that have hit since then; at the moment I'm about halfway through Perfect Dark (published in 2002 - I have a lot of catching up to do!). Boardgames, card games, role-playing games. Like Tycho Brahe I am consumed by a love of systems, and whether I'm manipulating those systems within a computer simulation or using a card-based representation, it's getting to know a new world that draws me into the experience.
Politics comprise one of the most complex, most fascinating systems ever conceived by man, and they fascinate me without end. I am liberal in my philosophy and my politics, and my political comments will reflect that.
I love to dance. I started when I fell in love with a girl from California on a cruise ship back in 1995 (I was 13) and made my dad teach me Nightclub Two-Step so that I could ask her to dance with me. Thirteen years later I'm now married to a woman I met dancing in Kyoto and am now taking weekly classes with her (I focused almost exclusively on Swing until this year, so I'm embarrassingly bad at and desperately in need of instruction in every other variety of standard dance).
I intend to focus this blog on these few most important of my many interests (though I don't know how much serious dance blogging I'm up to), and on the experience of living abroad as an American.
And now my lunch-break is over. See you again soon!
I don't suppose a great many people will ever read this post who aren't already conversant with the basic details of my life, but I'll just throw them up here for posterity, and because that's what you do with the first post of a blog, right?
First, my name: Benjamin Stürmer. I picked up that awesome family name via my recent marriage, and the oddity of being an American with a "ü" in my name is of course the inspiration for this blog's name.
My occupation: I am a Master's Student of Japan Studies at the University of Düsseldorf and work full time as a computer programmer at a medium-large firm that produces human resources management software. I'll be leaving the job behind at the end of this month and spending four months writing my thesis (on the history and identity construction of a minority called the Burakumin) in Chiba, Japan.
My interests: I cycle through quite a variety of hobbies, the majority of them traditional geek pasttimes. I'm finally emerging from a six- or seven-year dark age in terms of video games, and am now trying to play through some of the many great games that have hit since then; at the moment I'm about halfway through Perfect Dark (published in 2002 - I have a lot of catching up to do!). Boardgames, card games, role-playing games. Like Tycho Brahe I am consumed by a love of systems, and whether I'm manipulating those systems within a computer simulation or using a card-based representation, it's getting to know a new world that draws me into the experience.
Politics comprise one of the most complex, most fascinating systems ever conceived by man, and they fascinate me without end. I am liberal in my philosophy and my politics, and my political comments will reflect that.
I love to dance. I started when I fell in love with a girl from California on a cruise ship back in 1995 (I was 13) and made my dad teach me Nightclub Two-Step so that I could ask her to dance with me. Thirteen years later I'm now married to a woman I met dancing in Kyoto and am now taking weekly classes with her (I focused almost exclusively on Swing until this year, so I'm embarrassingly bad at and desperately in need of instruction in every other variety of standard dance).
I intend to focus this blog on these few most important of my many interests (though I don't know how much serious dance blogging I'm up to), and on the experience of living abroad as an American.
And now my lunch-break is over. See you again soon!
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