yakihito

In Da Pub

I finally got the chance to DJ in Oita. Last night I played at the PEI Pub, a gaijin (foreigner) bar in Miyako-machi, the drinking part of town. Being a foreigner bar, it was expectedly full of foreigners. Foreigners I had never seen. There are two other colleges besides mine in the Oita area, both with international programs, as well as people teaching English, etc. It seems they were all out last night, along with a good helping of Japanese.

Normally the PEI Pub is just a pub, but they're doing this new monthly DJ event. I brought them a mix and they nicely agreed to let me play. No money but I did get to drink for free. Actually, it was a nomihoudai, an all-you-can-drink party. Needless to say, people were well lubricated by the end of the night.

The DJ before me, a local guy, played a mix of hip-hop, R&B and house, the usual Oita club stuff. Not my favorite but there were so many people dancing, it was a good time. At one point, the normally reserved Chinese girl upstairs was freaking an American girl, and a dirty old Japanese man came up and started clapping and laughing. Then he tried to push me on top of the Chinese girl, repeatedly. Wow, dude, I'm not here for your amusement.

I went on around 1am and played pretty high-energy breaks and electro-house. The crowd, such that it was by this time (the nomihoudai ended at 1) were cheering and dancing. Good stuff. Until 2, when the previous DJ suddenly told me my time was up. I don't know what kind of agreement he had with the owner, or if he even knew I was coming, but I didn't really have a choice at that point. It was his gear, so it's his say. Of course, he came on and played some inappropriately heavy music and promptly cleared the dance floor.

I don't understand this mentality. Never have. We're all contributing to the party, the DJ, the bartenders, the people dancing. No one is more important that anyone else. He just played for 4 hours, and was likely getting paid even while I was playing. So why hustle me off the decks? Of course, I thanked him for allowing me to play. I am nothing if not gracious.

On the way home, we got a call that one of our group had left her bag in the club, so we trudged back to get it. Then we found out that this same girl threw up in a cab, and the cab driver made them pay about $80 for his trouble! The word for "to vomit" is haku but I prefer the slang: ribasu. It comes from the English "reverse." So she reversed all over the back seat of a cab. Nice!

Soto: Free Download

There's a great site called Neojaponisme with lots of essays on Japanese pop culture. I'm always finding interesting stuff there. The site also manages a free, online download label called Creation-Centre. Lots of great stuff there but I'm really loving Soto.

Don't know much about them, other than what's printed at the site (largely Japanese band from Los Angeles, with a member in Kyoto). Lovely stuff. Kinda folky, kinda electronic, very emotional. Perfect study music.

Check it out.

Fun With Garbage

The garbage schedule is something of a wonder here in Oita. I remember from my time in Tokyo in 2004 that the garbage schedule was a bit difficult to deal with, but out here it's just bizarre. How bad can it be, this garbage schedule? Brutal.

In America (and by America I mean the Bay Area), we put out the garbage once a week. That same day gets both recycling and refuse. The most I've ever had to sort was in San Francisco, which was cans and bottles in one box, newspaper in another, and lastly plant/vegetable bits. But get a load of this:

1. Burnable Garbage: Yes, they burn garbage here in Japan. You can smell it all over, a smoky tang that irritates the eyes. Included in this category is kitchen waste, leather goods, and plastic. Yikes!
2. Non-Burnable Garbage: Metals, glassware, small electronic appliances.
3. Plastic Containers: Recyclable plastic like packaging and bags.
4. Cans and Glass Bottles: Like what it says.
5. Plastic PET Bottles: These are plastic drink bottles. You're supposed to take the caps off and put them in with recyclable plastic containers.
6. Newspapers and Clothing: No surprises here.
7. Household Goods That May Contain Asbestos: Rice cookers are listed here. Seriously? Asbestos? No more rice for me, thanks.
8. Fluorescent Lights and Others: My schedule helpfully lists the following as belonging to this category: "Fluorescent lights and others." Gee, thanks.

This is a lot of sorting, is it not? But now the really maddening part comes: the pick-up schedule. It's divided by wards. I'm Nishiki-Machi 2. So I find my ward in the box on the left, and follow across to see, um, oh hell:

* Burnable Garbage: Mondays and Thursdays.
* Non-burnable: Roughly once a month.
* Plastic Containers: Every Friday. Tells you something about the level of plastic consumption in this country.
* Cans and Bottles: Twice a month. That's it.
* Plastic Bottles: Also twice a month.
* Newspapers: Yes, twice a month. Keep in mind that these non-weekly pick-ups are not all on the same day. Cans one day, bottles the next day, newspapers the next week.

To make matters even more complicated, you can't take your bags out to the little garbage shed by the street until the morning of a pick-up. Well, you're not supposed to, but we all do because, well, we're uncouth barbarians and also in protest of this needlessly complicated system. But the other day we all got emails saying the garbage people were upset and were refusing to pick up the trash, and thus the neighbors were upset (even though the trash is inside a shed where no one can see it, and it doesn't smell). So now I'm playing the game, like a good person.

Which means my apartment is FULL of plastic bags of sorted trash. Can't wait until roach season arrives.

Oh, and rumor is they just burn it all anyway. 

Oh God, Somebody Give Me a Taco, Please

Went out last night to an izakaya, a kind of Japanese tapas place, with Emily, another of the Americans here, for a little study break of beer and gyoza.

See:

Lovely stuff all around. I really enjoy izakayas, I do, but it doesn't always take care of my food fix. Lately, I've been really missing some specific foods from home. Like, jonesing. Here they are, in no particular order:

Tacos

I mean, authentic tacos al carbon. Greasy and spicy and from a taco truck with zero health code compliance.

Shawerma

Mmm, juicy chicken shawerma with maybe some pickles inside.

Coffee

I have coffee here, true, but the stuff I make in my room is so damn weak. Peet's! Peet's! Peet's!

Real Bread

I'm not what you'd call a bread lover but sometimes you just want a nice sandwich, maybe with dutch crunch or a nice sourdough, or maybe a whole grain. Here it's white bread or nothing. Thick, fluffy, tasteless white bread.

Brown Rice

What they call genmai here. It's prisoner food, not real people food. I'm tempted to get myself arrested just to get some extra fiber in my diet.

Belgian Beer

I like Japanese beer just fine. There's nothing nicer at the end of a long, hot day than a giant mug of Japanese beer. But hey, variety is the spice of life, right? And this life demands Belgian beer. Chimay, Duvel, Gulden Draak, Piraat Ale... Hell, even Stella Artois would be nice.

San Francisco Breakfast

I don't often go out for a big breakfast. But some Sundays just call for a tofu scramble, biscuits with vegetarian gravy and strong, strong coffee. I suppose miso and rice will have to do.

There's more, lots more, but I actually have to start studying again. Say, anyone want to send me a care package?

Nakatsu Castle

Oita Prefecture gets no love. Aside from Beppu, a hot springs resort town just up the road, guidebooks and websites rarely mention Oita. True, there isn't a lot going on here, but there are interesting things, like at least two castles. We visited one, Nakatsu-jo, last week on a class field trip.

Aside from another bout of bus sickness (I think it's because we're on the opposite side of the road than in America—I never get sick on buses like this back home) I had a lot of fun. I love castles. I want to see them all. Even though most are reconstructions (including this one) I don't really care. They're so beautiful.

See for yourself:

Nakatsu is about an hour or so north of Oita City, on the coast near the border of Fukuoka Prefecture. That day we also saw a medical museum, a soy sauce shop where they still make the stuff by hand in giant, 100-year-old barrels, and the Daihatsu automobile factory, which is I, Robot waiting to happen. See all my pictures from this trip here.

They'll Never Dry

Here in Japan I have my own little washing machine on my balcony. It's convenient. I can wash clothes anytime I want. Which is good because I didn't bring that much with me. Just enough for a week. When they're done, I hang them out to dry, and in a few hours I'm wearing clean, dry clothes.

Usually. Today it's raining. A lot. It's the beginning of the rainy season, so it will continue to rain. A lot. Have you ever tried to dry clothes when the air is full of moisture? It's not clothes drying, it's clothes wetting.

Of course, I have nothing to wear. Until the rain stops, and the sun comes out long enough to dry my clothes, I'll be wearing the same pairs of socks and underwear. 

Don't you wish you could hang out with me right now?

Learning Japanese I Really Think So

Sorry for the lack of posts lately. When you're taking 9 classes, midterms are really a bitch. Two last week, three next week plus a presentation, and then two more presentations and another midterm the week after that. They really like presentations in this school. No papers, lots of presentations. Oh, and I gave a speech at school last week too. Maybe I'll get around to posting about that some day.

When it comes to learning Japanese, us English speakers are the slowest of the slow. Compared to the Koreans and the Chinese, we're Zambonis to their F-1 Racers. Granted, a lot of them have been taking Japanese since middle school, at least in the case of the Koreans. Japanese for them is like French or Spanish for us. The grammar is pretty similar, from what I hear, and the two languages share a lot of loan words from Chinese.

As for the Chinese, they've got the kanji advantage, as Japan imported the Chinese writing system about 1400 years ago. Yes, there are some differences in the way a few characters are written, and yes, the pronunciations are different, but in most cases the general meaning is the same. They're able to see a new word and know the meaning, even if they still have to study the way it's pronounced. And there's about 2000 of these things we're supposed to know, minimum.

However, we English speakers do have one advantage: English loan words. Just as Japanese took in a lot of loan words from Chinese in the past, now it's taking in tons of loan words from English. These are all handily written in katakana, a phonetic syllabary. Even if we've never seen the word before, we can sound it out and recognize it as an English word.

For example:

パーティー (Pahtee) Party
コンピューター (Conpyootah) Computer
レベルウップ！(Reberu-appu!) Level Up!

As you can see from the last example, the word doesn't always make sense from an English perspective. "Level up" here means to improve yourself, as in go up a level. I think it comes from video games. Recently, I had some trouble with サービス (sabeesu), or "service." It can mean service like we're familiar with, but it can also mean "complimentary," like in a restaurant. I was recently handed a coupon that said:

サービス (Sabeesu)
プチアイス　(Poochi Aisu)

Complimentary
Small Ice Cream

The "poochi" part I think comes from Italian, and "aisu" of course is ice cream. No, there's no confusion with the ice you put in your drink because they still use the Japanese word for that, "koori." Interestingly enough, the kanji for koori is 氷, which is exactly the same as for pretty close to 水 "mizu," water. How do you know if you're getting ice or water? Context. Look closely. If the 氷 is on a bag of frozen water, then you can bet it's ice.

The Chinese complain they have to know English to learn Japanese. We complain that we have to know Chinese to learn Japanese. Meanwhile the Koreans happily leapfrog over us both. I have no idea how the Thai and Arabic kids keep up.

Now That's Hot

Oita is not a well-spring of ethnic foods. You've got Japanese food, Japanese food, and Japanese food that kind of resembles American food. So it was with great surprise and excitement that I entered the Indian restaurant I found randomly in the downtown area.

I ordered a curry and without thinking told them the level of spiciness I wanted: super hot. I'm no spice masochist, but I do like it spicy. In America, no matter how much you tell the wait staff at Indian restaurants that you like it hot, it's still never hot enough. I figured Japan to be the same. This is a country that just doesn't do spicy. The Chinese students and Korean students say Japanese food is too sweet.

My curry arrived. I took one bite and realized it was, truly, super hot. It was so hot I started hiccuping. I kept eating, hiccuping all the while, while my friend laughed at me.

"Don't *hic* laugh! It's not *hic* funny!"

The cooks from the back—who I presume to be Indian or Pakistani—came out a few times to make sure it wasn't too spicy, and to bring us fresh water, which we were drinking at a terrifying rate.

After the meal I was taken by the warm glow of endorphins and wandered around downtown in a happy haze. Today, however, my bowels hate me.

Happy End #1

While poking around the web yesterday I came across this article about Rolling Stone Japan's list of the 100 best Japanese albums. The article is interesting for a few reasons. One, because it points out that magazines in Japan have tended to not compile these kinds of lists, as they might piss off their advertisers. (Apparently cover stories are auctioned to the highest bidder, and album reviews are all positive.) And two, because the number one album is one that I actually own.

Happy End (はっぴえんど) was an early-'70s band fronted by one Haruomi Hosono, whom you might know as a member of Yellow Magic Orchestra, Japan's answer to Kraftwerk and the launch pad for another famous Japanese musician, Ryuichi Sakamoto. I first learned of Happy End from the Lost in Translation soundtrack. The song "Kaze wo atsumete" is played over the ending credits, and can be heard briefly in a karaoke rendition during the film. At the time I had no idea that Hosono was responsible for the song, or how popular it was.

Here is is in its entirety:

When I arrived in Japan this year some friends in Tokyo presented me with the album the song is taken from, Kazemachi roman. I was delighted, and after listening all the way through became an instant fan. "Kaze" is nice folk rock, but the album is much more varied than that. Country, blues, psych... all with a wistfulness and sadness that gets under your skin.

I guess I'm not the only one that feels this way, judging by the album's placement as the number one Japanese rock album of all time. The article also mentions a rival magazine that decided to make its own list, and went out of its way to mention that it would absolutely not be putting Kazemachi roman at the top. It gave it #32, but a lot of people must consider it number one for the magazine to make that statement.

Hosono left Happy End after only a few albums. He recorded as Harry Hosono and Tin-Pan Alley for a bit, releasing some really cool jazz-influenced stuff, before forming YMO in the late '70s and changing the way we think about electronics in pop music. He's also released a lot of ambient albums, also something up my alley.

So, does it deserve to be number one? I don't know, give me a few more decades to absorb Japanese music. There's so much stuff on that list I've never heard!

My Keitai

Everybody knows Japan has the best cell phones. What you're talking on in America is already like 10 years old here. Even little kids have better phones than you. So it is with great shame that I reveal to you my cell phone, or keitai as they say here.

I knew I couldn't afford one of the really cool phones, like the ones with TVs. (You think that antenna looks oddly old-fashioned for a cell phone until you realize it's to pick up TV reception, not phone reception.) But I had no idea that even the cool-looking, feature-bereft phones were still way out of my price range. And given that I'll be leaving after 10 months and will have to break a contract, I had to go with something that wouldn't cause me too many financial headaches come next year.

So this is what I got: a DoCoMo Foma L7041. It was free. It slides open. It has a camera and web access. And it's a bitch and a half to use. Even the girl setting it up for me complained how difficult it was to use. Features are buried in sub-menus and the keys are too small to effectively text.

But hey, free right?

Yeah, but now it's starting to die on me. At least once a week I have to pry open the back and pop out the battery to get it re-started. I see an awkward visit to the DoCoMo store in my near future.

You get what you pay for, I guess.