yakihito

All Hepped Up

Today I had my first experience with the Japanese medical system, and I have to say it wasn't that bad. No horror stories about nationalized medicine to be found here. But plenty of differences from America, that's for sure.

This all started because I needed to get some shots to travel overseas. I'm going to Korea this summer and possibly Vietnam in the fall, and I have no desire to bring Hepatitis-A back as a souvenir. I wish I had had the foresight to be inoculated back in the States but Hep-A isn't a problem in Japan, so I didn't see the need. Oh well.

I asked a Japanese friend in town who often travels where she gets her shots. She travels without inoculation(!) but inquired for me in town. Turns out travel shots are only available at one hospital, which is in Beppu, a 15-minute train ride up the coast, every other Tuesday from 1 to 4pm. I quickly made an appointment and then rushed out there today. Luckily, a Japanese-speaking friend could come with me to act as interpreter.

Beppu is known as the Las Vegas of Japan, a hot springs resort town full of tacky hotels and pachinko parlors. The hospital was not nearly so exciting.

I should sidetrack to say here that people don't really see private practitioners in Japan, they go to the hospital. It's like a giant clinic. And being part of a great bureaucracy, there were many steps to follow, and a correct order in which to do them.

First, we announced our presence and needs at the entrance desk. We filled out some paperwork and they made photocopies of my health card and school card (not sure why the second, maybe they have student discounts). Then we waited. Fifteen minutes later, I was given some kind of credit card-looking thing for the hospital, and we were told to go across the floor to another waiting area. Where we waited.

The hospital—the first floor at least—was essentially one huge waiting room. We all sat facing a wall, on the other side of which was nurses and beds and medical equipment and such. I stared expectantly at that wall. My name was eventually called and we were given more paperwork to fill out (Are you pregnant? No. Etc).

Then I had to take my temperature. This you do not by putting the thermometer in your mouth, but under your armpit. You do this right in the huge waiting room, with everyone watching. I wasn't sure whether to insert it from the neck of my shirt or up from underneath. I went from under, and pinched the thermometer in my sweaty, malodorous left pit until it beeped in disgust. I guess my temperature was normal—I still can’t convert Celsius to Fahrenheit.

After another period of waiting, I was told via public address announcement to proceed to room 9. I entered, expecting a waiting room, but found instead a doctor's office. He spoke English, and we talked about my travel plans and such. Hepatitis-A inoculation was what I needed. Back to the bus terminal I was sent.

Some time later, I was summoned by the nurses behind the wall, where I received an oddly pain-free injection into the triceps of my left arm. It was explained to my interpreter than we were to wait (what a surprise) for 15 minutes to make sure my arm didn't fall off or something. Which we did, and which it didn't. Lastly, we picked up my paperwork, revisited the entrance desk to hand over the paperwork, and were then (you got it) once again told to wait, this time to pay the bill.

There's a big desk at the front of the hospital that says in both Japanese and English, "Cashier." The cute girl in the bus station-like outfit called my name and presented me with a bill for $75. I paid, and we were done.

Now, this may seem like a lot of waiting but really, the whole process took less than 90 minutes. I've spent longer in doctor waiting rooms. Can't say I'm in love with this system, but as an alternative to our for-profit system, it's not so bad.

Here's hoping the shot works and I don't get the chance to compare Korea's medical system to Japan's. 

Kumamoto!

Last weekend I took the train west to Kumamoto, a fairly large town on the west coast of Kyushu for a little sight-seeing. Unfortunately, this being June, the skies never stopped dumping rain. However, unlike with my recent trip to Kagoshima, I was actually able to see Kumamoto's main tourist attraction, Kumamoto-jo.

Kumamoto-jo is one of the largest castles in Japan. The main building is a reconstruction from the 1970s but many of the other buildings are original. I particularly liked that you could walk underneath it. The support beams are massive.

Kumamoto-jo was the site of a siege at the end of the Edo era, when shogun loyalists held out against Imperial forces. This is apparently how the eating of basashi, raw horse, started. Nothing else to eat but the horse you road in on, I guess.

After seeing the castle and walking around in the rain, we decided to head for a covered shopping area, which was thankfully dry. After a spicy lunch of Sri Lankan food that came back the next day for a surprise encore, we spotted these goth kids loitering around Tower Records.

Turns out they were waiting for the band Antique Cafe to make a public appearance. Antique Cafe are a visual-kei band, which means they dress up like the girls that listen to them. Today they were wearing boy clothes, which was kind of disappointing. We waited around a bit more and then took off when we realized they weren't going to sing or anything.

The next day I was supposed to see Mt. Aso, which is actually a massive caldera (one of the largest active volcanos in the world), but I had a really bad headache so I went back alone while the others in my group went on ahead. I will definitely make the trip to Aso again—the pictures they brought back were beautiful.

Oita Dispatch 3: Catching Up With Adam

Yes, been very busy as of late. My nine classes continue to test my diligence with homework, tests and presentations. I've also been traveling on the weekends which is very rewarding but not so good when it comes to studying. This weekend I'm staying in and I thought I'd take the chance to get caught up on some things.

First off, I was supposed to participate in a sake tasting competition (for foreigners I think) today. The top prize was a trip to Tokyo to compete in the nationals. I canceled at the last minute though. I feel bad about it but I also have A LOT to do this weekend. I'm also DJing a friend's birthday party tomorrow which means I'll be out of commission from 6pm tomorrow until pretty much Tuesday. The last thing I need is more drinking.

Like I mentioned the other day, it's wet. Rainy season. Never stops. I have a little clothes washer on my veranda but no dryer. So my room has been full of damp clothes for the past few days. I've got the AC on full blast, which may actually be freezing the clothes into ice rather than drying them.

Bought a few plane tickets this weekend. One is for Tokyo. I'll be heading out there in August to see friends, eat good food and climb Mt. Fuji. I'll take the train back to Oita, leisurely stopping at sites along the way. I also bought round-trip tickets to Seoul, South Korea, for a September trip. (Interestingly enough, it takes the same amount of time to fly from here to Tokyo as it does to Seoul. Only 1 1/2 hours!) I'm really excited about this. I've been reading through Lonely Planet's guide to Korea and it sounds amazing. I'm going to do both big cities and small, quiet areas, maybe an island for a bit of beach relaxation. To make sure I don't pick up some unwelcome bug while across the Japan Sea I have to get some shots over the next month. Korea isn't Africa but Hep A is not unheard of there. No thank you!

At the dorm where I live, the students are primarily American, Korean, and Chinese. I've noticed an interesting grouping lately. The Koreans tend to hang out with Japanese students, and the Chinese with Americans. This is not always true of course, but I think there's something here. Korea and Japan have very similar cultures. Both are small, relatively homogeneous countries with histories of isolation. They are also both heavily influenced by Confucius, and thus have hierarchical societies. China and America, in contrast, are large, multi-ethnic nations that both consider themselves the center of the world. Americans and Chinese are both outspoken and refuse to take any shit. You'd think this would lead to more differences than similarities but somehow we put our nationalities aside and just make a lot of noise. Yes, both Americans and Chinese are loud. At least, the ones in my dorm are. (Oh, and lest you think it's a language thing, while most of the Americans can not speak Japanese so well, limiting our ability to communicate with them, the Chinese do speak it well. But they still always hang out with us.)

So there you go, that's what's going on right now. Oh, I still have pictures from last weekend's trip to Kumamoto to post. Hopefully this weekend...

Kagoshima!

Went down to Kagoshima this past weekend, the southernmost big city in Japan, to get out of Oita for a bit. Kagoshima is famous for Sakurajima, an active volcano that sits on (or actually, IS) an island in the middle of the bay right across from Kagoshima. The volcano is massive. Massive. Dwarfs everything around it. And actually it's not even an island anymore. An eruption in 1914 spewed out so much lava the island grew until it met land on the other side of the bay, and now it's a peninsula. Sakurajima has a constant stream of ash spewing out. It looks like this:

Or actually, it would if it hadn't been overcast the entire weekend. Here's what I saw:

I suppose I saw it, which means I can scratch seeing a volcano off my list. Well, I got to walk around ON the volcano at least, which was cool.

Kagoshima has more than 600,000 people yet is still east to get around. We took street cars.

Kagoshima also contains the gateway to liberty, something most people don't know.

We visited a famous garden but it rained so hard, I was too miserable to enjoy the beauty. That is, until we noticed all these bright red crabs scurrying out from between stones to enjoy the rain. They were everywhere!

Oh, and in case you were worried like I was about the cleanliness of the cups in the hotel room, have no fear.

If only the bed covers had had a similarly reassuring message, I might have been able to ignore the blood stains.

Kagoshima!

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.

Photos: Usuki Stone Buddhas

On Saturday I went down to Usuki, about an hour south of Oita, to see the stone buddhas. Four clusters of buddhas are carved into rock exposed by a volcanic eruption. The buddhas were carved about a thousand years ago and are somewhat rare in Japan, as most buddha sculptures tend to be carved from wood.

Equally interesting to me were the grounds surrounding the clusters, filled with dense, lush forests and bamboo groves. There was such a sense of peace in those groves.

More photos of the buddhas and grounds here.

10 Things To Do In Japan

Japan is a big place, with lots to do. I've already been here a month and it seems like the weeks are just flying by. Even with long weekends the time is getting away from me, with me just hanging around rather than taking advantage of what this magnificent country has to offer. So, me being a writer and all I thought I'd write down exactly what I want to do on this trip.

Here they are, in no particular order:

1. Climb Mt. Fuji

Fuji-san is open for climbing every year in July and August. July is finals for me so it looks like it'll be August. You climb (more like walk steadily uphill) all night and then watch the sunrise from the top. I can't wait.

Who's coming with me?

2. Be Able to Speak in Full, Interesting Sentences

I thought I knew how to speak conversational Japanese. What I in fact know how to speak is broken Japanese, with annoyingly shifting tenses and an inability to make the words and grammar I know that I've studied come out of my mouth. I have about 9 months to get this one down.

3. Stay in a Capsule Hotel

Nothing says Japan more than a claustrophobia-inducing casket of a hotel room, right? There are no capsule hotels that I'm aware of in Oita so it looks like I'll have to get this one out of the way on some weekend excursion to Osaka or Tokyo. I've heard they're not all that excited about foreigners staying there due to their lack of language skills. Alright, more of a challenge.

4. Eat at the Stinky Ramen Place

Before I left for Japan, Rupan777 at Gaijin-zoku told me to not be afraid of the smell coming from ramen joints. The smell, he said, is a good indicator that the flavor of the soup will be spectacular. What he didn't say was that the smell would be something akin to boiling, rancid gym socks. There's a place near my apartment that I actually run past, covering my nose with my sleeve and breathing through my mouth. However, I love me some ramen (it's Nagasaki-style chanpon, yum) so I'm determined to one day open that sliding glass door, sit down, and order up a big bowl of gym socks.

5. Eat Basashi (Raw Horse)

Kind of a long story here. My Dad's wife is into Native American things, and had this great book about power animals and what they can teach you. There's an animal you identify with, or that appears often in your life, so you look up that animal and it tells you what's going on with your life. We should also look up animals we don't like, as that can tell you something too.

I've never particularly liked horses. I don't hate them, we just have a mutual distrust of each other. I feel very uneasy on a horse and always have. With this in mind, I looked up "horse" and found that it represents travel and adventure, something I had been denying myself and was rectifying by going to Japan. (Oddly enough, I recently learned that the opposite of my Chinese zodiac birth animal, the rat, is the horse.)

Upon researching Japan and its food, I found that there was a dish called basashi, which is essentially horse sashimi. I don't really eat red meat, especially not raw red meat, but this intrigued me. What if, like a cannibal, I could eat the flesh of my enemy and thus attain its power? I was resolved to do this.

Update! Last night I ate basashi! I was out with some friends from school and the guy next to me ordered basashi, not knowing it was raw. He tried to cancel his order but I seized the opportunity and insisted I would eat it. And eat it I did. And it was… pretty good. Nice, tangy flavor, not too gamey. It's raw, which takes some getting used to, but you eat it with a squeeze of lemon and ground ginger, and that makes it pretty nice.

Take that, horse!

6. Go to a Maid Café

OK, I know it's a total cliché but I have to go at least once. For those not in the know, a maid café is a café where the waitresses dress in baby-doll maid outfits, kind of like French maid outfits gone super cute. They greet you with (in Japanese), "Welcome home, master," and serve you $10 Cokes. It's something of a phenomenon in Tokyo, and there may even be one in Oita. They're starting to open in the US as well.

7. Visit an Onsen

Japan is volcanic. This means active volcanoes (see number 10 below) and hot springs. There are so many hot springs, or onsen, in Japan, it staggers the mind. It's what people do here on vacation, and what I should really do. There are two reasons I haven't done it yet.

One. There's a lot to remember when taking the waters in Japan. Check out this list. I'll wait while you read it...

OK, I guess that's not that complicated, but I really don't want to screw up. I know a guy who made sure to properly bathe before getting in but forgot to rinse out his pits. Soapy bubbles issued forth from under his arms, causing everyone else in the bath to make pained faces and back away. Ugh!

Two. I have tattoos. These are forbidden in onsen, because they are associated with yakuza. Establishments can't say no yakuza but they can say no tattoos. Maybe I can slide because I'm a foreigner but maybe not. I could just play dumb and act like I don't understand, but if I'm with a group then we all have to leave, etc. I have heard that there are private rooms, so perhaps that's an option.

Whatever happens, you can be sure I'll write about it here.

8. Visit Ise Jingu

Japan has two religions that exist side-by-side, even synchronously. They are Buddhism and Shinto. I like the aesthetics of Buddhism, the calming sounds of the prayer bells and the smell of incense, and the philosophy of Buddhism is very in-line with the way I view the world. But it's Shinto, the native, animistic religion of Japan, to which I feel a real affinity.

One of the main Shinto shrines in Japan is Ise Jingu, a shrine to the sun goddess Amaterasu. The shrine has been there for more than 2000 years, meaning that it predates the introduction of Buddhism by about 600 years. But what's really interesting about the shrine is that every 20 years it is knocked down, and a replica rebuilt next to it.

This to me is a kind of time travel. By freezing time, we're able to experience what the shrine was like upon its original creation. It is not an old building, nor a new one, but an infinite one. It is the past, present and future together. This to me is incredible.

9. See the Boredoms Play Live

I love the Boredoms. The Osaka band's space rock is pretty much perfect music to me. I've seen them play in San Francisco, which was great, but to see them in Japan would be a dream come true. Unfortunately they play more in the States than here.

10. See an Active Volcano

Like I said, Japan is volcanic. There are numerous volcanoes here, especially on Kyushu, the part where I live. Less than two hours away is Aso, a caldera with a volcano inside it. And at the southern end of Kyushu is Kagoshima, a town that sits in the shadow of Sakurajima, a volcano so active the people who live there often have to carry umbrellas because of the ash.

And they have a lot of stinky ramen places! How can you not love this place?

The View From Oka-jo

Last weekend I caught the train out to Taketa, a small town about an hour and half inland from Oita. Apparently the town had a pretty impressive castle back in the day ("the day" being samurai times) but it was torn down voluntarily when power was transfered from the shogun to the emperor.

Although it's known as the Oka-jo Ruins, a better name would be Oka-jo Foundation. There's really nothing left of the castle. Nothing. But what is left are some pretty fantastic views of the surrounding, lush countryside.

This is why I came to Japan, for views like this. *sigh*

I Heart Monkeys

Yesterday I went out to Beppu, the next nearest town on the coast, to take in a few of the sites. I saw both the Umitamago Aquarium and the Takasakiyama Monkey Park, which are located right across the street from each other. I was frankly pretty excited about the monkey park because, well, I love me some monkeys.

On both previous trips to Japan I thought I would get to see monkeys. First I went to Nikko, but all the monkeys had taken to hiding in the hills after the local authorities began tazering them to prevent them from attacking tourists. On the next trip I traipsed to the top of Miyajima, an island near Hiroshima, only to be greeted by a sign that said the monkeys had all gone to sleep. Rip off! So it was with great anticipation that I approached the steep stairs that led up to Takasakiyama Monkey Park.

I had heard that the monkeys run around wild here, and indeed they do, but there is nothing to prepare you for the sheer force of nature that is hundreds of wild Japanese macaques. Pictures don't do it justice, but video comes closer. Here are two films I took of feeding time. There's a fence keeping people from the main feeding area but this a very *open* fence, and the monkeys run in and out and around your feet.

OK, just watch:

That's me laughing very nervously in the second video as they swarm by. I was afraid they'd knock the camera out of my hand.

After feeding, I saw this: two baby monkeys playing.

Kawaii! Cute!

On the way out of the park I noticed this sign, which I had somehow missed on the way in:

And in case you missed it, the most important part:

I'm glad the monkeys don't understand English then!

(Lots more photos on my Flickr page.)

Sea Lion Feeding Time

Went out to the Umitamago (Sea Egg) aquarium in Beppu yesterday to see the fish. They had a nice selection of fish that live in Beppu Bay, plus some critters that don't, like walruses, dolphins and sea lions. At one point they trotted out some of the latter to entertain the guests at a close distance.

Here's some video I took:

I love that the sea lion is going, "Banzai!" Well, he's not actually saying it but he's getting himself up in the air.

(Lots more photos on my Flickr page.)