Yamaha, Iwaki

I should probably be writing about my apartment and showing you people images of where I live and such, but it is 2am and I’m dead tired and I bought a guitar today. How could I not write about my new guitar instead? Also, my apartment is still a mess. I’ve got the kitchen organized and sorted out my closet, but in my living/dining area, I’ve amassed an incredible amount of documents, books, pamphlets, receipts, bags, notes, and who knows what else. Tomorrow I’ll be able to get this cleaned up.

I think that I’ve been spending quite a bit of money in the week that I’ve been here. I’ve bought a bunch of kitchen stuff for my apartment, a new hard drive to back up my photos, a cable to hook my laptop up to my TV. The social events can be a bit costly as well, but I think it’s important for me to build a network of people in Iwaki – although I didn’t seem to have to worry about money last night (it being my birthday and all)… more on this another time.

I went to a new part of town today in search of a cable for my computer. Just a quick note here: I managed to get directions to the electronics store and ask the name of it all in Japanese. Whilst in this area, I saw the name of a second-hand store that another JET was talking about the other day. The place is called “Hard Off” – not sure what the translation is supposed to be here, but the place sells everything from dishes, clothes, furniture, electronics, and even musical instruments. The electronic section is pretty amazing as the shelves are lined with old speakers, dvd players, old Nintendo game systems (game cubes were stacked a half dozen high and took up a whole shelf – each costing only $10). It was in this section that I found this old Yamaha nylon string guitar. It was missing a string, some of the wood is scuffed up quite a bit, and the strings were all out of tune. After tuning it best I could – the tuning knobs are pretty stiff and it’s a bit hard tuning a guitar that is missing the 4th string, it really came together. I figured out that “Blackbird” can be played almost in its entirety without the 4th string. Anyway, the guitar actually sounds pretty good and it was only 4000 yen – which is about $40 US. It definitely needs new strings but it reminds me a lot of my Fender at home.

Getting it home was a bit interesting on my bike. I managed to secure it pretty good between my back and my backpack for the ride home. Needless to say, when I got home, I was occupied up until dinner time and managed to show up quite late for some evening plans at the Iwaki Festival going on downtown. I still managed to catch the end of the Odori, which is the main feature of the night… more on this another time.

These are photos of my new guitar in its new digs beside the window.

Of Washing Machines and Plastic Seals

***This post was supposed to go out last night, but I couldn’t get the photos uploaded because I was backing up some files.***

When I first started this blog in Vancouver, I wasn’t sure what I would be writing about once I got to Japan. I wasn’t really sure that I would have anything to write about at all. I guess I’ll just have to take things as they come.

I woke up at just before 5:30 this morning -- probably still because of the jet lag, although I seem to be feeling better during the day. I spent quite a while last night unpacking, putting things away, washing the dishes that were provided with the apartment, and buying odds and ends. Because I had so much free time this morning, I thought that I’d put a load of laundry on while I washed another set of dishes (I’ve been doing them in spurts). The washing machine is an interesting appliance as it is a washer and a dryer in the same unit. I can’t read any of the symbols on it, but I do know a bit about what each knob supposedly controls. I was pretty proud of the fact that I started a load with very little problem.

Once the load of laundry finishes, it dumps the water into a very shallow basin directly below the machine. While I was doing the dishes, the first cycle finished and the sound of the water being released caught my ear as virtually every sound in this apartment is new to me. I thought something sounded a bit odd about the sound of this running water and decided to wait and see what sort of Japanese technology has been put into place in order to make this sound. As it turned out, we have this sound in North America as well. It was the sound of a shallow basin filling very rapidly and quickly overflowing all over my apartment. Lucky for me, I had only set the load for 44 litres and not the largest 47 litre configuration. I am also fortunate that the floors are made of some sort of laminate and that I had recently hung my bath towel that I brought from home nearby. In lew of a proper mop, a bath towel holds quite a bit of water.

As it turned out, each of my drains has come with a plastic seal that is hidden behind a plastic filter. This plastic seal makes any drain quite useless until removed.

Because I had woken up so early, I still had time to go for a jog to the nearest 7-11 to buy some bottles of water (I don’t think it’s wise to drink to much tap water when first moving to a country on the other side of the world – and I’ve been drinking a lot of water). I also cooked some rice and tofu for breakfast, finished washing the dishes, hung the laundry and had a shower before work. It was a productive morning and I learned a lot.

Included in this post are a couple of photos I took in a bit of haste this morning of my first home-cooked meal in my new apartment and a self portrait of myself just moments before leaving for my first day at my new place of work. I will write more about my apartment and iwaki soon.

Tokyo Part II: Day 3

I’ve just read over a bit of the last gibberishy post that I made last day and am actually surprised that it makes as much sense as it does. This one won’t be significantly more coherent as I think jet lag is still hitting me hard. I’ve been told that generally it takes about a day for each time zone traveled across for the body to recover.

The last couple of days have been very busy as we’ve been in and out of seminars all day and last night we went out to an all-you-can-eat-and-drink bar. This type of restaurant has a name in Japanese, but I can’t recall it at the moment. I’m sure that it will come up sometime in the near future. I wasn’t sure if I was going to go at first, as I was up at about 4:30 that morning. The night was organized by our prefecture advisors as a way for all of us to meet each other and have a good time. There were a few other JETs from Fukushima and Gumma who also joined us. I was glad I went as it was an amazing night and I got to meet a lot of people who I look forward to working with.

Today, seminars continued throughout the day. A lot of people seem to disappear from these seminars as the day goes on. I thought about skipping out and taking the opportunity to explore Tokyo, but I found the sessions fairly interesting. If nothing else, they do a good job of getting us motivated to get thinking about the work we will be doing and the people that we will be working with. The city I will be working in is only about 2-3 hours away from Tokyo anyway, so I will be back eventually – and hopefully in a better frame of mind.

Tonight, we went to the Canadian embassy for some presentations on Canadian specific experiences in Japan. The building is apparently one of the nicest embassies in Tokyo. At this point, many of us are so JET lagged and a quick scan of any lecture or presentation will reveal several people’s heads bobbing up and down as people try to stay awake. They also gave us a few resources and some Molson Canadian beers. Afterwards, I grabbed a quick bowl of noodles (this time soba), and then decided to head back to the hotel and catch some sleep before heading off to hour prefecture tomorrow. We have a 5 hour bus ride to our prefecture where will have our first meeting with our respective supervisors and then I think I’ve got another hour or so drive into Iwaki where I finally get to see my new apartment for the next year.

Anyway, my brain was finished several hours ago.

It’s 5am here in Tokyo right now and I’ve been in Japan now for about 15 hours. I’ve spent the last 2 hours tossing and turning in bed, so I thought that I would get up and do something a bit more productive and then maybe try to get a bit more sleep before our first seminar starts at 9am.

I’ve been meaning to update the blog more during the events leading up to my departure for Japan, but it just didn’t really happen. In a nutshell, the last 10 days or so before leaving Vancouver were quite busy – at times, and overall, a bit stressfull. I’ve lived in the same house for all of the 25 – almost 26 years of my life and the longest that I’ve left for was 3 monthes when I traveled across Canada.

In the days leading up to Japan, I spent quite a bit of time seeing friends and family, packing, organizing beaurocratic odds and ends, and probably a lot more that isn’t coming to my very jet lagged brain right now. I know that I said many goodbyes – some people I would say goodbye to only to see them another half dozen times before leaving. Packing was stressful right up to the last minute where zippers were almost bursting at there seems. I’m happy to write that my baggage weight came in at about 22.7 kg for one of my bags – where the limit was 23kg.

Definitely a highlight of my last days in Vancouver was the party we threw over at Janice’s parents house. It was pretty amazing to see so many of my friends and family all gathered together to send me off. We also got my band to play a final set in the backyard despite torrential rain and thunder storms.

In this time I also managed to eat way too much of some of the best foods I’ve had in a while. I’ve probably drank too much beer and wine and fireball whiskey – or maybe not enough, I can’t quite remember. I’ve said many goodbyes. I’ve had quite a lot to laugh about. Quite a bit to cry about. I’ve been stressed and angry. I’ve been anxious. I’ve been tired and probably slept to much. I saw so much of the city, but probably not enough. I’ve packed. I’ve rearranged my place. I’ve severed ties, cancelled accounts, tried to open new ones. Tried to stay cool and calm. I studied. I was lazy. I was excited. I tried to stay real.

And now I’m here and it’s real.

I started looking into the JET Programme last August and decided to apply by the deadline last November. I finally received notice of an interview by January – and then had my interview in February. My acceptance came in April and my placement in late May/early April. Since then I’ve been doing my best to study Japanese and prepare myself for this experience. If this coming year lasts as long as the one leading up to it, I think that I will be quite happy.

I’ve been reading a bit about culture shock and how it can affect people moving to another country on the other side of the world. The first stage of culture shock is referred to as the “honeymooner’s stage,” where everything appears very new and exciting. Every experience is a novel experience. A person who experiences this stage of culture shock feels as if in a state of euphoria. Whether traveling for work or for pleasure, it feels like being on vacation all of the time.

I would say that this stage, mixed in with a bit of jet lag (which doesn’t seem as bad as when I first started writing this), is pretty well exactly what I’ve been feeling for the last 15 hours. We went out into the city last night for my first Japanese ramen noodles, which were delicious. The area we were walking in seemed a bit small, but still amazing. Everywhere I looked was eye candy. The streets were flooded from the lights of signs and fluorescent lights. We walked past arcades full of grown men attached to flashing lights. People were playing Playstation 3 in the streets. Every store seemed to have someone standing outside hawking there wares. Everything was a mesmerizing stimulus of light and sound. I wish I got more photos, but it was raining quite a bit. Hopefully I’ll get more in the next few days that we’re here.

Thanks Greg for the photos from the party.

Pre-departure Meals

I’ve not told many people about this, but one of the reasons that I’m going to Japan is because of the food. I am a food lover in general and I’m very fortunate to live in a city that enjoys a palette that is as diverse as the people living here. Eating Japanese food is especially a privilege here and I look forward to comparing our Western imitations of Japanese food to the real thing.

Maybe this needs clarification and maybe it doesn’t, but my tastes are also a bit broader than the typical “California roll combo,” which is found in its abundance all over Vancouver. Of course I enjoy a good California roll just as much as the next Vancouverite. However, some of my favorite Japanese cuisines include their selection of noodle dishes – ramens, udons, and soba noodles, which are very common here, but also very underappreciated. I was very happy to learn that one of Japan’s leading ramen cities can actually be found in Fukushima prefecture. I’ve read that the city, Kitakata, has one of the highest ratios of ramen bars per capita in the world.

Another recent discovery for me is the Japanese hot pot, or Sukiyaki hot pot, which uses a soy sauce and cabbage base to cook meats and vegetables in. I’ve been a big fan of Chinese and Korean hot pots for a while and the Japanese equivalent ranks just as high for me.



Although I’m looking forward to immersing myself in Japanese cuisine, I am definitely starting to feel a bit of pre-departure anxiety towards the foods that I will be leaving behind. I have for the last few weeks been dealing with the reality of leaving my friends and family behind – my social network, my social safety net, my social security. Similar to these social comforts, I have also enjoyed for most of my life a sense of culinary comfort as well. I can appreciate the fact that I can walk into a restaurant or supermarket and be able to recognize the majority of items here.

Of course, food and people really go together. When I say that I will miss the foods that I’ve enjoyed all of my life in Vancouver, I think that much of this is connected to the people that I’ve had the pleasure of sharing these foods with. Included in this post are some shots that I took of the dinner that Janice and I made for ourselves last night. Although the steaks were a bit tough, I think that it was one of our more successful endeavors to date.

Word Cloud Revisited

I made a post recently about the label cloud that I set up for this blog. You can see the post here if you like. I was pretty proud of myself for being able to customize my blog this way, but the image that i used was just an image I found using a quick google search for "word cloud."

I've just found a site (Wordle.net) that will generate customized word clouds based on a piece of sample text that you can type or paste into a window. You can also paste the URL of a site into a window and it will generate a word cloud based on the words used at this site. I've included two word clouds with this post. The first cloud is based on the words used in this entire blog; the second is comprised of words used in this particular post.

Not only is the image representative of this site, but it is also fascinating for me to see a snapshot of words that I've used in my writing over the last few weeks. For instance, I tell my students not to use the phrase "I think" at the beginning of every sentence. It is fairly redundant considering that what you are writing should be considered a reflection of what you think of a topic. Yet, the word "think" is close to my most used word on this blog -- and growing more so with the writing of this post. Another word that might be detracting from the assured nature of my writing is the word "might" -- or more specifically, another word that is detracting from...

I was surprised to see the word "event" so big, given that i've only written one post about an event. I think (there's that word again!) that this might be due to the fact that i write, "in any event" as a transition quite often in my writing.

A few pleasant surprises: "love," "solid," "people," "music"

Words that i should use less of: "around," "couple," "just," "pretty," "something," "probably"

Vancouver Folk Festival

Janice and I went with a friend of ours down to Jericho Beach last night where the Vancouver Folk Festival was on. We went to this festival a couple of years ago and had a great time. This year, we didn’t actually buy tickets to go into the event. We just hung out down at the beaches where we could still hear the music. We didn’t get to stay long or see much this year as the sun was already going down when we arrived, but it was still a memorable evening.

We parked our car about fifteen minutes away from where the festival was going on. As we walked along the beach to the festival, we could hear music from the main stage. As we got closer, their was a group of African drummers playing while people danced around them among tiki torches. There was a couple of guitarists playing among the crowd, but they were drowned out by the thundering rhythms. I love how the spirit of the festival bleeds throughout the surrounding area. All around us, people were tossing Frisbees, playing instruments, drinking wine out of the bottle, showing of skin art, dancing, and enjoying life.





The sound of the music grew louder as we got closer. We arrived at an outdoor market that resembled more of a shantytown where there must have been almost a hundred stalls, each selling handcrafted jewelry, fabrics, paintings, and the like. I’ve never been one for these kinds of trinkets, but still, I love seeing all of the different people and their wares.

I remember when we first arrived at the festival a few years ago. The first image that stuck in my mind was the amount of bikes that had been parked in a grass field. The event had a bike-check system where there must have been a few thousand bikes lined up. Some might say that the event is overrun with hippies, but I think that the population is broader than that. The type of people that make up the event are generally more open to different lifestyles. The event is stands for more than peace and love. It is about being free to be who you want to be and to be exposed to other ways of life – whether it be through music, dance, art, dress, tattoos, food, or people in general.

Inside the event – and the grounds surrounding it, the people are what make the event exciting. When we reached the main-stage a few years ago, the ground in front of the stage was littered with magnificently coloured blankets where people left their chairs, coolers, bags, and other personal belongings. They would leave these items behind for the day while they walked around and enjoyed the festival. Nobody seemed to be worried about anything going missing.

There were no police at the event, or any real security other than the fence surrounding the grounds. We stumbled across the odd person smoking pot and this was the first year that they served alcohol at the event, but although the scene was very lively, it could not be described as rowdy in any regard. I think that it’s pretty amazing that such an event is put together and runs so smoothly. I also love the culture that this city is home to.