Tadaimatte

A Lie in a Letter

2024-08-30T15:20:00.000-04:00

"If there are any aliens, time-travellers or espers in this class, now is your chance to tell me."

I was sorting through some old photos and journal entries, and going through old drafts that never got posted to the blog, and there's plenty of things that take me way back to my days as a JET. (Sometimes I think maybe I ought to take all that content a little further than a blog, given the vast amount of stuff I wrote at the time, and publish it as a Japan-memoir of sorts, heh.)

One of the things I brought home with me when I left Japan was a box of letters that resulted from the most entertaining and successful project I ever did with my students. I wish I could remember where I came up with the idea, but I opened it with line above, a little nod to The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi, which was super popular at the time - plenty of my students would pull out the Haruhi dance for a little fun. The project was called "A Lie in a Letter," and it was a creativity lesson I assigned to the ninensei, or second graders. (This would be the Grade 11 equivalent in Canada.)

The basis of the lesson was that they had to write an "outrageous" story about themselves in the form of a letter to me, and I read some pretty incredible stories as I was helping students check their spelling and grammar. I had brought coloured paper, markers, stickers and envelopes, and set them loose for an entire 50-minute period to work on their outrageous letters. The principal, vice-principal and two Board of Education members actually came in during one of my classes that week and watched the first ten minutes of the lesson...stressful for both me and the students, but it went all right! They were quick to grasp new things, so they managed to get started without a hitch.

The first time I did this lesson was also the first time I ever had to evict students from my classroom ten minutes after class ended because they were entirely too wrapped up in what they were doing. It was really satisfying to know that they were so invested in the project that they wanted to stick around and finish it during the lunch hour.

That first year, I took the whole pile of letters home with me on a visit to Canada, and I actually hand-wrote replies on the plane! It was such a big success that I couldn't wait to refine the concept a little bit and assign the same project to another group the following year. The second time I assigned "A Lie in a Letter," I even brought a pile of 1-cent Canadian stamps back to Osaka for them to stick on the envelopes. I kept every single one of those letters until the day I left Japan, and packed a handful into the box I took home with me. They'll always make me laugh, and remind me of my fabulous ninensei students!

2024 Travelogue - Osaka

2024-08-14T16:02:00.002-04:00

Breakfast at Komeda Coffee to start our day

The Japan trip to end all trips - that was the idea when my mom suggested going overseas to celebrate her 70th birthday. Japan was not her first choice, by any stretch of the imagination - I highly doubt it was her 2nd, 3rd, 4th or 5th choice, to be honest, but even though it was her birthday, somehow everyone else's enthusiasm for my suggestion won her over. And I'm honestly very glad it did, because when you have a mix of limited-mobility seniors and three adult kids with wildly different interests and energy levels, we were still able to pack a maximum level of experiences into the trip just by virtue of going to a country that one of us knew really, really well. It wasn't a relaxing vacation, but it was certainly unforgettable.

We hit the ground running after landing from a Vancouver stopover at Kansai International Airport, which even in May, was intolerably muggy for this family of east coasters. (Thank God we didn't go in August. Even I have flashbacks of the heat that hit me full in the face when I arrived in the country for my JET orientation.) I'd booked an airBNB near Dotonbori, because I wanted everything to be as walkable as possible for this first leg. I didn't know what peoples' energy levels would be like for going to the opposite sides of the city or further afield like Himeji or Nara, so I stuck with Nippombashi Station as a base, thinking it would make the exeunt easier when we left a few days later.

Rented an apartment on the banks of the Dotonbori River

Nothing had changed in the area, to my relief. It was more crowded than it used to be, and people were lined up for what I presume was the latest trendy spot to eat according to TikTok, but other than that it was the same old Dotonbori. We went out for kushikatsu (oops, should have saved that for when we got to Shinsekai) and had an early night the first night.

On Day 2, I took them to nearby Kuromon Market, which is a place I didn't spend nearly enough time at when I was living here. It was one of Emily's favourite spots in the city (no surprise, since she is such a proficient home cook). Then we went to Shinsekai and had lunch at an izakaya there. We saw Billiken, though we didn't go up the tower - it seems I will have to wait another few years before I eventually get to the observatory at either Tsutenkaku or Kyoto Tower. We also ran into a cool retro arcade in the shopping street on the way back to the subway station.

This arcade was near Dobutsuen-Mae Station

From there we headed back uptown and saw the Umeda Sky Building, to which I'd never been. I didn't realize my mom was adverse to heights, so going up the escalators was an experience for her (oops). I also didn't realize there was no actual garden at the top of the building and that the Floating Garden Observatory was a misnomer. I had convinced her up there with the promise of a garden! (Double oops.) Still, we got a great view of Osaka, cloudy though it was. We finished off the Umeda visit with a quick trip to Yodobashi Camera, where I picked up some new headphones (when in Yodobashi, I just have to buy headphones) and then headed back to Namba for the evening. My parents wanted to check out KFC, but since the Namba location I knew from the 'curse of the Colonel' was no longer around, we ended up at Namba Parks for dinner, before returning to our little apartment.

Day 3 was set aside as a "day trip" day for whoever wanted to go further afield. My brother wanted very much to visit Nara, and I thought my stepfather would want to see Himeji, and I had been sent a video of the monorail at sunset at Ikoma Sanjo and I sort of wanted to check it out. In the end we did exactly none of those things; us three kids woke up at 8 am raring to go, and we ended up head to Universal Studios Japan. USJ wasn't originally on the itinerary, because a) I'm the only person who speaks Japanese, so the anime attractions aren't that interesting to my siblings and b) they removed the Back to the Future ride and I'm still salty about it. However, the idea of Super Nintendo World got brought up, and even though it wasn't possible to cheap out and use a Twilight Pass like I usually do at USJ, we decided to leave the parents in their beds and venture west.

Yoshi's Adventure

My siblings and I are sort of an odd combo together. We have fun when we hang out, and we have some overlapping interests, but each of us is a totally different personality type. For me, with my recent physical problems, standing in a lineup for any reason made me not want to do the thing. (Especially if it's a LONG lineup.) But that's the theme park experience, and we were way too late to buy express passes to anything. As for my siblings, they were interested in Nintendo World but nothing else in the park. So we arrived, bought tickets using the birthday discount (May birthdays, yay!), registered for Nintendo World, and when we saw that our Nintendo Land entry was 3:30 PM and it was presently 9 in the morning, we promptly left to kill time elsewhere. XD; I would have liked to check out the Detective Conan cafe or maybe the Demon Slayer ride, but we were looking at 100+ minutes in line (and all in Japanese), and that wasn't doable for anybody. Instead, we went to DenDen Town to buy my brother a Super Famicom.

The lay of the land had changed a bit in DenDen Town, but not too much. More small shops boarded up, though whether they were just taking a holiday or had never come back post-pandemic, I couldn't tell. The relocation of Super Potato was unexpected, to me, and the prices there had skyrocketed. The days of grabbing a loose but functional retro game cartridge of a known title for 500 yen are basically over. The shops know that people are willing to pay for nostalgia properties, and we couldn't find a SuFami with all the components for less than 10,000 yen. A far cry from the one I bought my first week in the city, with all the trimmings, for 3500...!

We hit a lot of shops in the area before turning around, after lunch at CoCo Ichibanya, and heading back to USJ for our Nintendo World timed entry. We rented me a pushchair since I was way past the point of tolerating standing still for any length of time, and my brother wheeled me around the park. It was a bit inconvenient to manoeuvre, since it was SO crowded (guaranteed that everyone who'd entered earlier in the day was still there!) but it was a lifesaver, especially when we needed to line up for a ride. There wasn't time to ride multiples, so we went on the Yoshi's Adventure ride, but the real reason we were there was to take in the lay of the land, which did not disappoint.

Sunset at Super Nintendo World

The mini-games were a ton of fun, too, and we bought a wristband to get the full experience. By the time everything was winding down for the night (it was still spring, so late closure hadn't begun for the season yet) there was just barely enough time to hit one other attraction before the park closed for the evening. My brother indulged me and went to the My Hero Acadamia show despite not having the first clue what was going on. That was very sweet of him, I thought, since he had to be tired from running around all day and also pushing me! After that, though, it was time to say goodbye, go home and pack up - after a quick stop for ramen at a hole-in-the-wall place near Nippombashi Station. The next day we planned to head to Kyoto and make that our base for the following week.

Returning to Kansai

2024-08-08T15:41:00.007-04:00

View from Umeda Sky Garden (with the Gate Tower Building in the background!)

After quite a few long years away, I just came back from my first trip to West Japan in about six years. This was the first time I'd been to the Kansai Region in a long time, and my first time there with family. My fam didn't come visit me for the years I was living in Osaka - my mom is the very definition of a nervous traveller. It took a lot of convincing to finally get her to go, but now that both of my parents are retired, we'd been urging them to travel while they were still relatively healthy. And so, I planned and executed as perfect a 2-week Japan vacation as I could manage, starting in Osaka, of course.

It was so satisfying showing them all the things I love about the Kansai area. I was a little selfish in cutting Tokyo time SO short that they barely saw any of it at all (1 day in Atami, 3 days in Tokyo), but there's so much to see and do just in Osaka and Kyoto alone (never mind all the great places I would have loved to take them in Nara, Wakayama, Shiga, Kobe, et al) that even the week and a half spent there wasn't enough.

Not much had changed, in the places we went, except of course for the extreme number of tourists. On one level, I hate contributing to the overtourism problem. We skipped most places like Kinkakuji, Gion and Kyomizudera that would have been staples to take guests to ten years ago, in the pre-Instagram world. I tried to go off the beaten path when I could. When I saw the chaos of people at Fushimi Inari (when I lived there, there was never any significant number of people on the hiking trails, no matter what time of day we visited), I had tried to prepare myself for the fact that it had become one of the #1 destinations in Kyoto, but it was still mind-boggling to see. The days of using Fushimi Inari's trails as a way to get your daily exercise in (yes, I tried this in 2008 or so, since Keihan Fushimi was just a hop, skip and a jump away from my home station) are long gone. I did get up at 7 AM and hit the trail for old time's sake, and I mostly avoided the crowds, but I had to turn back at the pond, since we were due to move on to our next destination that morning. On that same day, I encountered my first extreme shinkansen delay - the eastbound Tokaido was 30 minutes late leaving Kyoto. Couldn't believe that happened on the day of my parents' very first and only shinkansen trip.

I have a lot to say about the trip, but not enough space to say it all in one post, so I'll divide it into a few entries. I hope you'll enjoy them.

'Kotatsu' as the #1 query?

2024-08-06T15:04:00.000-04:00

Now that's the kind of content I like to see! Though maybe not in August. Let's dial it back a few months.

The Japan Foundation Toronto Library is Digital

2021-05-28T14:21:00.008-04:00

Huge news for Torontonians looking to stay connected to Japan!

Kobo and Libby
working in harmony to help me devour books

The Japan Foundation, Toronto launched a brand-new digital library last month via Overdrive, the popular library-lending app.

Since the pandemic has closed their physical JFT location, this is huge news for library lovers. It goes without saying that without regular borrowers, the library could find itself in a serious dilemma, and pivoting to a digital platform in the meantime is a great move. (Unfortunately for me as an author, Edokko is a Kindle exclusive, so you won't find it in the JFT catalogue - but maybe they'll pick up Meet You By Hachiko at some point, who knows!?)

Considering that they started from zero, I'm impressed at the collection that's been put together so far - as of this writing, just shy of 500 books, with a good mix of fiction and non-fiction, manga, and Japanese-language materials. Kudos to the library staff for their hard work, here!

JFT library card holders can borrow instantly by visiting JFT OverDrive and logging in with their library card number and PIN (last four-digits of phone number). If you're new to the Japan Foundation Toronto or haven't been in in a while, the staff will need to help you renew your card first, but it's easy and quick, and so worth it.

For me, the timing of the Overdrive launch couldn't be better, as we've almost fully packed up for a move, and all my books are currently in boxes. My Kobo Libre has been saving me with access to tons of ebooks via the Toronto Public Library, and the minute I saw the JFT had gone live with theirs, I immediately headed over on the Android app Libby to get hooked up and browse the selection. My only regret is that I can only borrow five books at a time, and I'm continually running up against that 5-book limit and having to return things I didn't actually get to read yet in favour of the holds I wanted more. 😂 What to read next!?⁠

⁠I still prefer the real-paper feel, but pandemic + moving has finally gotten me aboard the ebook train. How many of you read ebooks as well as physical...?⁠

Edokko

2021-05-25T14:16:00.006-04:00

Yikes, it's been a while! I'm so sorry not to have much to share these last few months - or rather, I have tons, but have been so caught up I haven't written any of it!

Last Monday, my second novel launched in paperback and as a Kindle Unlimited exclusive.

I began working on Edokko when I was newly back in Canada and truly felt the sting of leaving Japan behind. It's a joy to see it finally in print, and the publishing process brought me back to those early days (don't miss the cameo of the Japan Foundation's Japanese-Language Institute Kansai, where incoming Osaka JETs gathered for language lessons when we first arrived!) and the ups and downs of expat life. I still miss it very much.

Available now in paperback and ebook format

Lily Jennings is Going. To. Japan.

Sixteen and on top of the world, she's beyond excited to be setting off for an entire year as an exchange student in Tokyo. Fashion and fun are foremost on her mind as she arrives ready to meet her new host family and embark on a grand adventure, livestreaming all the way.

What Lily isn't expecting, however, is for her urban host family to cancel at the last moment and leave her hanging with nowhere to live. She's shipped off to the small town of Ajimu (sorry, where!?), a billion miles from anywhere cool and exciting, with a neurotic host sister, no chances for romance, straight-up-vile classmates and a microscopic community watching over her every move.

Too bad for the people of this small town—nothing's going to hold Lily back when she wants something!

Find it on Amazon or your favourite retailer via http://edokko.lorengreene.com!

Pandemic Melon Pan

2021-01-27T19:29:00.003-05:00

An acceptable substitute, given the situation

Hello blog, it’s been awhile!

Like most of you, I’ve had little chance to be out and about in town recently, even though I’ve heard about new Japanese restaurants opening up, places closing down, changing hours, etc.

One thing I have noticed, in my neighbourhood at least, is the plethora of options for Japanese food available via delivery services that I had absolutely no idea existed. Normally I’m a bit meh on these apps, because I know a lot of them don’t give a fair cut to the restaurants, and when possible I want to support the restaurant directly. However, in the time of COVID, that’s harder than it used to be. Especially here in Toronto, where we’re under a state of emergency and all dine in options are completely closed.

I want to hope that the restaurants getting on board with DD or UE is helping spread the word that those restaurants exist and therefore are doing them at least a bit of service. I know I’ve found a couple new options in the neighbourhood and beyond that I never knew were even here.

Which brings me to the focus of today’s post!

A couple of weeks ago I started having intense cravings for melon pan. It’s been quite a while since I could get back to my regular source (....Japan), but my baking attempts in the past have also failed. I really just wanted to buy some and be done with it. I used up all my creative cooking/baking karma with the Dalgona phase (and subsequently a lot of Vietnamese egg coffees, steam milks and Thai iced tea batches) back at the beginning of the pandemic.

Muahaha, bring those tasty baked goods right to my door

In Toronto, traditional melon pan is harder to come by, and the only place I could think of that had it was Nakamura Bakery at J-Town in Markham. I thought to myself, well, I’m not willing to drive an hour for melon pan; not today, anyway. But surely something else more local must have popped up in the last 5 years!? Surely someone is making melon pan closer to downtown by this point!?

So I turned to the food delivery apps.

I did a couple of searches for Japanese food, and a couple of searches for melon pan, and I didn’t really find the traditional type that I was looking for, but I found something else of interest. Not too long ago in Baldwin Village (and two other locations), a new shop called Hattendo appeared selling cream pan, originally from Hiroshima. I’d seen their shop in Japan a couple of times; I used to walk by one when I was passing through Yokohama station. But I’d never actually tried their bread. I thought, well, they have cream pan with a melon pan top on it, and black sesame lattes, and they deliver to my house, so let’s give it a go. Ooh! Seasonal flavours!!

Turns out they don't really photograph too well, though

Hattendo’s “melon pan” is a pretty distant cousin of traditional melon pan - what I was really getting was cream pan with a melon pan top, so the interior was unlike melon pan at all. However, it did scratch that itch a little for me. And it definitely opened my eyes to the fact that there are a lot of good Japanese options that have surfaced in Toronto over the past few years.

Since melon pan day, we’ve also ordered in from Little Pebbles, a Japanese bakery in Kensington market, and I have several tasty looking izakaya dinner options marked for the next time we order in. There’s also a new ramen shop in the west end (an area that is sorely lacking in ramen at this point) called Musoshin, and they make shokupan! haven’t tried it yet, but looking forward to getting out there sometime and checking them out. Must be tough to open during this pandemic, so they probably need all the props they can get.

So the next time you’re craving Japanese food in Toronto, even if you want to go pick it up yourself to support the businesses, the delivery apps are actually excellent resources to find out what’s new around town.

In fact, I just discovered that I can get mochi donuts delivered to my house. Be right back...

Meet You By Hachiko

2020-12-31T00:58:00.000-05:00

Now available in stores

What would you do if your best friend lived half a world away—and suddenly vanished?

Loner Grace Ryan feels completely invisible. Awkward and shy, she can't seem to get ahead in her studies, social circle, or new relationship with her childhood best friend. But discovering Tokyo street fashion ignites her creativity and leads her into an unlikely online friendship with a Japanese high schooler.

Beautiful and fashionable Kana eats, sleeps and breathes English in order to pass her university entrance exam, but she's tired of sacrificing her own happiness for everyone else's high expectations. Kana finds a friend and conversation partner in Grace, relieved to distract herself with someone else's problems for a change.

Just when things are finally going right, Grace's best friend abandons her, her relationship falls apart, and Kana disappears without saying goodbye. Fearing for her friend's safety, Grace boards a flight to Japan... only to realize that she is completely unprepared for the bright lights and confusing streets of the real Tokyo.

Finding one lost girl among twelve million is much more than she bargained for.

Meet You By Hachiko is now available to purchase online in paperback and ebook formats, or contact your favourite independent bookstore to support local!

Can I Learn Japanese As An ALT?

2020-11-05T13:32:00.019-05:00

Tokyo is a foreigner-friendly city -
but that doesn't mean everything is in English

You might already know that the December iteration of this year's Japanese Language Proficiency Test (aka the JLPT) was cancelled. It would have been an ideal year for me to test, to be honest, since until a short while ago when I started working on my writing full-time, I had a lot of time on my hands. I did a couple of months of Japanese lessons over Zoom, went full-tilt into watching Kansai-based J-dramas to help get my dialect back after 4 years of speaking 東京方言 at work, broke out all my materials last seen at the time of passing N3 in 2015.

There was a time when I really thought I would come back from Japan completely fluent in Japanese. That would have been nice!

It does actually work for some people, especially those out in the sticks. Or if you're naturally gifted with languages! At one point I thought I was, because I'm very good at imitating correct pronunciation, and I even started my BA with a linguistics minor. Big surprise when I discovered my language talent was only for pronunciation and I am more than useless when it comes to grammar.

There's an inaccurate belief that if you move to another country to live, you will magically pick up the language via exposure, and it's a great way to become fluent. Well, unfortunately for me, there is no magic osmosis method of learning Japanese. That isn't to say that I don't think immersion is the best way - it absolutely is. I very frequently tell potential exchange students how useful a method immersion is to learn. However, the city JET experience (and, as you well know, ESID!) frequently does not lend itself well to this. There's too much opportunity to just stay in your native language, especially now when we have Google Translate at our fingertips. Every day, I went to work; in my classroom, we used English 98% of the time. Spoke English in the English Department, spoke English after school at English Club, went home to read books in English to combat homesickness, and either hung out with my English-speaking JET neighbour or chatted in English online with my friends back home.

It was not quite what I envisioned when I moved to Japan.

It goes without saying that I did try. I socialized with my Japanese friends, took aikido classes in Japanese, went out with my co-workers, sang karaoke, attended conversation classes or struggled through translations in my spare time. I like Japanese. I wanted to learn it - I wouldn't have even been there if not for starting my linguistics minor with that first Japanese class. What I actually needed was study, and lots of dedication, and that was tough. I did all my own lesson plans and we did not use Japanese in the classroom

Hit those books!

It shouldn't have been such a big a shock to me, but I was incredibly disappointed when I got home from Japan and immediately failed N3 of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test. I knew I hadn't worked hard enough. Not enough study, not enough reading, not enough repetition, and most importantly, I had assumed that I would just pick things up. I certainly did - but I didn't have enough grammatical foundation and reading skills to build on.

I had the interest and drive, and I had 2.5 years of university classes under my belt before I arrived. If I'd received a placement in, say, Shikoku rather than Osaka (not that I would ever have given up my precious placement!), I would probably have achieved my goals with fewer distractions. Most JETs request urban placements, and Tokyo, Osaka and Kyoto are right at the top. If you receive such an assignment, however, and you do want to become fluent, you need to have an incredible drive to learn in a limited amount of time. The former ALTs I know who are N1 or N2 fluent started out as country JETs, went to Japan on a student exchange program, or stayed on in Japan after finishing their placement - or all three!

So can you learn Japanese while teaching English in Japan as an ALT? The short answer is yes; you're in a prime position to pick up at least N5 level just by existing there for a year. If you want to become fluent, however, you need to work for it, as with anything - remember that it won't just come to you!

Hachiko Paperback Is Coming

2020-10-13T18:27:00.006-04:00

Well, it's been a tumultuous 8 months, and with the absolute tanking of my industry, yours truly is back at her computer full-time.

Doing what? Well...I've decided to turn all my attention to my writing, going forward.

I never expected this, after more than a decade away from my freelancing career, but in that decade I happen to have completed or partially-written 4 novels (two of them Japan-centric), so it felt like the universe was giving me a boost. A boost in which I am stuck in my apartment with 800+ COVID cases popping up in Ontario daily, no job, and the very helpful support of my partner telling me he'd rather I not be working in any job where I have to leave the house. So here's a trial period; for the next eight months, working on these novels is my job. Taking them from unfinished to finished, and doing all the necessary polishing and marketing, is my main focus right now, starting with Meet You By Hachiko.

So what's new? Well, after 8 months on the Kindle Store, Hachiko is finally getting a paperback copy!

There were definitely points in time when I honestly didn't think this book would ever be on anyone's bookshelf. It was originally a project in my free time leading up to Christmas 2009. I thought that a story about two teen girls, Canadian and Japanese, bonding over their interest in early-2000s Harajuku street style was a touch too niche for most mainstream North American publishers, and teen fiction is well out of the usual scope for the Japan-centric publishers.

Thanks to progress, though, of the kind I never could have imagined in 2009, here we finally are! Within the next six weeks, the paperback will be on Amazon. After that, who knows what's next!? You can find it on Amazon Canada, or Amazon.com.

Expect this blog to be coming back in some capacity as well, when I need a break from the editing drudgery.

It's a tough time to be missing Japan (when I was last there, in no way did I ever think I would be away from it this long!) and blogging about that probably isn't going to help much, but maybe I can make it a little easier on those of you who are missing it, too.

Thanks for sticking with me!

It Finally Happened

2020-03-04T17:45:00.008-05:00

Something was holding me back for a long time, but you know what? I decided, a ridiculous ten years later, that I was going to put this out there.

Thanks all, for your support!

TOKYO CITY 憶えているかい　ホームの片隅で

2016-06-01T16:01:00.006-04:00

So I've been fairly busy with a lot of things lately, and while I tried (and will continue) to keep work-related things off the blog, I thought I'd check in and note that I recently finished my job in one local Japan-related field and moved to another. I'm sad to have left my office and the great people there, but my contract was ending, and an opportunity came up that I couldn't refuse. So what this does mean for me...?

Well...!

As it turns out, it means a lot of travel to Japan.

I'm so excited to have already been back to Tokyo (and eventually I want to take a vacation to my true second home Osaka, of course) and the first visit was really and truly surreal. Maybe it sounds really silly, but I think anyone who has had their heart in two countries at once can relate. It's not about Japan itself but the feeling of being immersed again in a place that was once "home" that I missed very much.

I took the train from Narita out to Azabu-Juuban, and on the long ride, it was hard to do anything but wax nostalgic! It was early, but even on a Saturday at 8 AM, students in uniforms were taking up most of the train car. On their way to their club practices, I'd imagine. One high school-aged boy sat beside me and I immediately recognized his cologne or body spray as a familiar scent from my own classroom at 〇〇 High School. I'd never been on that train line before or seen that scenery, but just being there on that train, sitting with the Saturday shoppers and the schoolkids and breathing the air and seeing the signs fly past the window, I was feeling so natsukashii.

I wasn't meeting my friend until 9:30, so I strolled through Azabu-Juuban for a time, a little wowed from how it had changed since I last visited, with Ami-chan years before. Ichinohashi Park was completely gone, and a construction site was in its place. Azabu-Juuban's main station entrace, outside the Shotengai, had also been spruced up a bit. Funny, but I never visited Azabu again after taking Ami-chan there, even when I had lots of time to kill in Tokyo in the past. I guess I felt that as a pop-culture location, most of the places I would have liked to see had already been gone for years by the time I moved to Japan.

It was really nice walking through there though, and after a stunning only-in-Japan Cantaloupe Melon and Cream Frappuccino at Starbucks and a melon pan run, I eventually ended up in Roppongi Hills to meet my friend. We saw the Sailor Moon exhibition and had lunch at CoCo Ichiban, which I really still don't have the recipe nailed down for yet. Then we were out of time, and I had to head to work.

I was trying to pretend that this was a normal Tokyo trip like the many ones I'd taken before, but as on the visit to Japan a year ago, I couldn't shake the sense of "limited-time" urgency. I probably never will be able to manage that totally, given that when you're on a company trip, the clock is ticking. On the bright side, the next trip is already in the calendar.

See you soon.

If You're Happy And You Know It

2015-11-20T12:32:00.005-05:00

Ride a bike!

(But not in Toronto, in winter.)

It really is unapologetically pink...I guess I see why M was so dismayed when they opened this sucker up at Calgary Airport!

The Young and the Chariotless

2015-10-29T17:03:00.001-04:00

When I landed back on Canadian soil in August of 2010, the first thing I did was purchase a bicycle. Having a new bike right away, I hoped, would take away the sting of leaving behind my mama-chari in Osaka, at the very last minute, as I hastily dropped the keys with a Post-It note on my co-worker's desk on the final day. I needed the bike right up until that day, and I didn't have time to deal with boxing it up for transport across the Pacific. I thought that at least if I left it at school, it would be used by someone, and perhaps someday I would see it again. I took the second key home with me, just in case.

The first week home, I bought a cheap Wal-Mart bicycle. I needed to get to work, and I'd become accustomed to the independence of travelling by bike. I also bought a helmet, because unlike in Japan, I was significantly more concerned about being hit by a car. It was a Raleigh five-speed cruiser, and not an expensive one; it did have a partial chain guard, which was the main thing I was missing about my mama-chari at the time, as I remembered ripping up a few pairs of jeans on my mountain bike as a youth. It also had the curved handlebars I liked on cruisers.

I have to assume the Japanese adapted their bicycles from European ones, as they were trading with the Netherlands as early as the 1600s; Japanese bikes bear strong similarities to Dutch ones. The covered chain guard and skirt guard are very uncommon in North America. Fender mudflaps and rear racks occasionally show up on American-made bikes, but are considered standard in Japan, along with the rear wheel lock and ubiquitous front basket. I would have liked to go for a bike with all the trimmings, but I had to settle for what Wal-Mart had in their inventory at the time. In retrospect, I was actually lucky to get a bike that had two out of the six features I wanted. I installed a rear rack and basket myself.

Eventually, as all Wal-Mart bikes are wont to do, my bike began losing steam in its 4th year, and during a particularly rough trip down into the Nordheimer Ravine one autumn, my jacket bounced out of my rear basket and twirled itself around the derailleur, which fortunately did not end in my dying in the ravine. The bike was never particularly good at switching gears again.

Dutch in action at Casa Loma

But we're going off on a tangent now. As I searched for a replacement to my bike (I had taken that cheap Wal-Mart bike with me on the plane to Toronto, wrapped in a tarp - can you believe it?) I decided that it had to be Dutch or nothing. I wanted a skirt guard; I wanted a proper rear rack. I wanted a mama-chari. I walked down Bloor Street taking photos of bikes I liked and jotting down their make and model to Google later. I never walked by a bike without giving it a once-over. To my surprise, the premium to get such luxuries as full chain guards required paying CAD $600+ for the bike. As I looked at bike shop after bike shop, almost buying a Giant-brand Liv Simple, I realized that I would never be able to tick all the boxes affordably. I finally settled for a step-through Beater Bike, with a partial chain, and a rear rack. What I hadn't bargained on was how much less hill-friendly the Beater was going to be compared to my Raleigh, with its fat tires and five speeds. The Beater, gorgeous though it was, was useless on hills, and the tires were the perfect size for getting caught in streetcar tracks. Riding it was exhausting. So I went back to the drawing board, formulating a plan for my trip to Japan in February to just buy a cheap mama-chari, have them box it up right in the shop, walk it to the post office and pay to have it sent home. I figured I'd be out $150 for the bike, $50 for domestic, $100 for the international shipping. Maybe a bit from customs on the other side. That sounded a lot better than the $600-ish I was pricing for Dutch-style bikes with gears in Toronto.

I think you guys already know this is going to go downhill.

I left the job of actually buying one until the last moments of our trip. I looked at bikes at Asahi Cycle in Rinku Town and Tokyo, but I never spotted one close to a post office (an essential for this plan to work). Eventually, when I was on my own in Tokyo with just one day left in the trip, I realized this wasn't going to work. I went on Rakuten and found a seller that did international shipping for Daiwa bikes, and I bought a cute pink Nana+ bike. No need to drag anything to the post office myself! They shipped to Canada!

...except that they only shipped to Canada through their proxy service. I had used Tenso before, but not in a few years, and the hoops they had me jump through just to get the bike shipped anywhere were out of this world. I waited two weeks without seeing my item appear on the "my page" section, even though the domestic shipping said it'd been delivered. I emailed them, and had no response for days. I started to worry that maybe this company was less reputable than I originally thought. I sent a third help request, which got a response at last, and was informed since it was oversized, they hadn't yet connected the purchase to my account, oh, and also it was too oversized to be shipped abroad. It had arrived fully assembled. I learned later that this is the standard for bike shops in Japan. Tenso said they were unable to downsize it for me by removing the pedals/turning the handlebars, as they weren't trained to do so.

From there we began the lengthy process of finding a solution, any solution. Tenso offered to ship it elsewhere in Japan for me, but in order to do that, I had to verify my address in Canada. Mind you, I'd already done that when I bought things through Tenso in the past, but it had to be done again, including scans of my driver's license and the receipt of a postcard at my mailing address in Canada. That's right, I had to wait for a physical postcard to arrive by postal mail at my apartment. Only when they were satisfied that I really did live at my address in Toronto would they allow me to redirect the bike somewhere else, but obviously, not to Toronto! They urged me to let them courier it to a friend.

I don't have tons of friends in Japan whom I'd be comfortable asking for a favour so large as "can you receive this bike in the mail, bring it to a bike shop to take it apart, and put it back in the mail?" and even fewer that I wouldn't mind being laughed at by. (As genuinely fond as I am of my co-workers at 〇〇 High School, and as much as they already knew I was quirky, I prefer not to be remembered as "that one that asked me to ship a bike to her".) In the end, I asked my friend Nicole, of Irish Chocolate fame. She returned to Japan after leaving 〇〇 University and is now an English teacher in Chiba. She saved me from a separate mishap involving buying Mister Donut cups on Yahoo! Auctions, and so I thought she might be able to intervene again. Luckily for me, Nicole agreed, and some time later my bike appeared, fully formed, at her apartment.

Nicole, bless her, bought a bike-sized cardboard box online and wheeled it all down to her local shop, where they took it apart and packed it up. Then she brought it back to her place (how!?!?) and called Japan Post for an at-home pickup. Except...now it didn't fall within Japan Post's size guidelines. The JP Post guys returned to Nicole's apartment two hours later with the box in tow. It was too big! She told me it would have to be done via a commercial shipping company like FedEx. Now we were getting way, way too expensive, and I wasn't sure what to do next. I'd already sunk more money into the box and the domestic shipping to Nicole, and the losses were too big for me to cut now. We decided to Frankenstein the box to make it smaller, since that approach worked for Emily when she sent her kotatsu home, but after some measuring, it literally needed to be half the size. Nicole promised to look up some options when she got home from her vacation in Europe.

I decided to take a different tactic. My roommate, M, made plans to go to Japan for a concert in October. I decided to ask her if she'd check the bike as her second piece of luggage (oversized). She agreed without too much protest, to my relief, and so I asked Nicole to have the bike couriered to Narita Airport instead. Surprise - the luggage shipping company that we usually use for the airport, doesn't accept bikes. Nothing about the size, never mind that it was in a cardboard box and disassembled, they just don't do bicycles. Nicole had to call JAL ABC, because apparently Sagawa thought we were asking them to ship some expensive French racing bike worth $8,000 and not the little steel mama-chari I bought at Daiwa Cycle for under two hundred bucks. Luckily JAL ABC agreed to take it (after warning me about a COD fee) and it was delivered to Narita on the day M was scheduled to return to Canada.

Ah, but it's not over yet! As I gallivanted through Montreal on a rainy Saturday night, just before midnight, my cell phone alarm went off, reminding me that "M Is At The Airport Right Now." And then there's an email in my inbox dated 30 minutes prior, saying "Does your bike have suspension? Because if it does, I can't take it with me." Followed by, "If you don't answer soon, I have to leave." Oh noooooooo--

I emailed back as quickly as my thumbs would function, NO, NO SUSPENSION

ALSO PLEASE DON'T LEAVE

After all, what was the next step if the bike got stranded at the airport? Call ABC and try to convince them to ship it back to Nicole (I really wanted to stop bugging her) or to another friend? Jes kindly agreed to receive it when I sent a desperate-sounding email asking for her address, but I didn't want to face the phone call where I explained that I, an uninvolved third party, wanted to use a foreign credit card to have this package sent not back to the sender or recipient but to someone else altogether. Also, what was Jes going to do when she got it? It was just too big!

Luckily, M hadn't checked in for her flight just yet, and decided to forge ahead. Air Canada, bless them, accepted the box without complaint, and it was successfully on its way to Canada at last. I waited until 2:30 AM for the inevitable email about something going wrong, before finally dropping off to sleep. In the morning I called for an airport van cab, and then I called The Bike Joint down on Harbord Street to arrange assembly, and then I recruited a friend with a car to drive it down there with me. BIKE BIKE BIKE BIKE BIKE.

It wasn't until she arrived in Calgary and they opened the box for inspection that M realized the extent to which I had thrown her under the bus.

I found this note written on the whiteboard when I got home, after M was safely sleeping off the jet lag:

...but at least I have my bike.

VHS Tape Bonanza

2015-08-13T13:33:00.003-04:00

A box of tapes on their way out of the library

The Japan Foundation Toronto is moving, and though that means a lot of changes and adjustments for those of us who found Bloor and Avenue pretty convenient, the upside is that the library is overhauling, which means clearing out old items, which means VHS TAPE GIVEAWAYS.

You might have guessed from my persistent interest in all things retro, that I have just a teensy bit of nostalgia for decades past, with the 80s/90s (my formative years) entrenched firmly at the top. That means I don't just treasure the memories of taping my favourite shows on the family VCR - I still own the family VCR. I actually received a VCR-DVD combo unit for Christmas of 2013! However, 99% of my tape collection is at my parents' house, so I left it there to begin the long project of dubbing dozens of old favourites onto DVD whenever I visit them for the holidays.

So, when the Japan Foundation Toronto decided to get rid of most of its videotape collection to save space...well, needless to say, the airport x-ray techs probably got a kick out of my suitcase as it went through the scanner on my most recent trip back home. It was so hard to resist! I found some fabulous Tokyo-in-the-late-80s-early-90s snapshots with videos like Neighborhood Tokyo, Tokyo Date, NHK The News 1985 and Norimono Ippai. Lots of glamour shots of the Yurikamome Line, pre-extension, in that last one. I also scored the Ichikawa classic Tokyo Olympiad, and four out of a set of Japanese recent-history programs covering events like the Hanshin earthquake, the marriage of the crown Prince (now Emperor), and the crash of Japan Airlines Flight 123, which was actually just in the newspaper here, as the 30th anniversary was yesterday.

All in all, a pretty impressive bounty of pre-millennial pop culture. I'm sad that these tapes can't be borrowed from the JFT library anymore, but on the other hand, it was good timing for me, because I was able to take the time to watch and enjoy them all, and they won't end up in a landfill, either. I was happy to see how quickly the rest of the tapes (there were at least 500 given away over two days) were picked up by other patrons to take home.

Looks like at least a few others out there still have VCRs!

Small-Town Adventure

2015-04-12T10:00:00.015-04:00

For my 2011 National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) project, I decided to write a story about small-town Japan. I had written a story set in Tokyo for a previous year, and I wanted to go in a different direction, even though I had very little experience with small-town life. (〇〇 City is not exactly the size of Osaka, but it's very, very far from being inaka.)

I enjoy research - I'm the sort of person who will get caught up for hours on a winding path of Wikipedia articles. I particularly like learning about urban development, and trains. (I probably have a massive article due in the near future about our train journey from Hokkaido to Kyushu taken in February.) So for me, not knowing much beyond the JET Journal perspective on inaka life was not a deterrent, but a challenge!

While preparing for NaNo this time, I decided to choose a place I was interested in, and then do the research to make the setting plausible. I had of course lived in Osaka and I had written extensively about Tokyo the previous year, so it was time to go further afield, and there was an obvious first choice. I'd recently re-read Ash by Holly Thompson (set partially in Kumamoto), and also discovered the blog nipponDAZE, which chronicles JET life in Oita-ken in the 90s. Kyushu was right up my alley, and I was sure there had to be a town somewhere near Beppu - where Emily and I spent New Year's in 2010 - that a disillusioned exchange student might find her calling in. A few Google searches of JET blogs in Oita turned up a match with a population short of 8,000 people and no train station of its own. At the time, it was not available on Google Street View. (It is now, if you want to have a look.) I made email contact with a JET alumni who had a fabulous website - I'm sure Joel never expected anyone would try to write a novel based only on his blog's descriptions of his town- and started from there.

As with any NaNo project, of course, November ended and then I was slammed with the JLPT, prepping for Christmas, nengajo, and the usual writer's burnout that comes when you devote 30,000 words to a topic and then realize you don't know where the story is going. So I never quite finished the tale, though I intend to go back and revisit it for NaNo 2015.

Brother Google watches over our travels.

With that said, my small-town novel was at the forefront of my mind when I planned my two weeks in Japan this past February. In 2011, I often daydreamed about quitting my telephone job and moving to Kyushu to write the great Japan-set YA novel, living at Khaosan Beppu and trading cleaning services for room and board. Or, if I had some savings, in a little one-room apartment with a tatami floor, because I'm still not over that. By 2015, though, I was at a different point in my life, and there wasn't much chance of getting a lot of time for creativity while travelling. I decided to somehow fit Kyushu - even though I had never driven a car in Japan, and our primary destination was Hokkaido - into the trip. My travelling companion had little interest in hot springs, but Kyushu was close to my heart now, and she obliged me, for whatever reason. I applied for an international drivers' license and booked us two nights in a ryokan, following our day in Kyoto. We worked an almost-nonstop pace from Sapporo to Beppu, via blue train and shinkansen, in three days.

Alighting in Beppu, Cassie and I spent the night, then rented a car the following morning for my "research trip." (She manned the camera and is responsible for most of the photos below.) We spent four hours wandering and driving in the area without any direction at all, just exploring. At first, I really thought I was imposing, because we could have been at the Hells in Beppu by that point, or - so I imagined Cass would prefer - way back in Nakano Broadway, working the gatchapon machines. Somehow, though, it became a grand adventure. The tiny, run-down shrine on the cliffs, the bronze turtle statues, the quest to find some restaurant - any restaurant - to eat at - we were soon laughing and snapping photos of everything, getting lost, running away from adults who we thought might be suspicious of gaijin taking pictures of the school, and slowly navigating hairpin curves in the road while the super-confident local drivers leaned on their horns behind us. Oh yeah, and going through the ETC toll lane by accident and bringing all toll operations to a halt while we tried to sort out what was going on. (The rental car had an ETC broadcaster, but no card in it.) We were actually very sad to leave the town without seeing it all, but had another appointment to keep in Beppu that afternoon.

It was a gorgeous, sunny day and the highlight of the trip, particularly for Kyushu - the rain would start pouring that evening and chase us all the way back to Kansai. And a good memory. I hope if you've been to this town, you'll enjoy our photo memories of the day.

Arriving from the highway

Cassie mans the camera while I drive down what we think is the main road

Small-town feel

We're keeping an eye out for places characters might visit

These apartment buildings look like someplace an ALT might live!

We asked the GPS to take us to the post office, and so we pulled in here to decide where next

...as it turned out, we were RIGHT beside the school!

A peek inside the baseball clubhouse (?)

School view

School from the opposite side

Famous for its wine, and turtle soup. Grapes are everywhere!

Street shots

I thought this was very striking

Great mansion name!

Decided to drive over this bridge and see what was on the other side

Turtles on the bridge

Neither of us can resist torii gates

Not the same gate. This one appeared on the other side of the tunnel you see above, and leads up the mountain. We decided to climb the stairs; see what we could find

I was not expecting to find a Peace Pole here

Had we come six weeks later, this place would undoubtedly be flush with sakura

Stone tablets at Sanjo shrine

Seems to be falling into disrepair. We didn't see anyone else at all, either

Strolling on the shrine grounds

Sanjo shrine grounds

A weathered path

This river borders the town in the northwest

Back in the car to continue adventuring

A winery? Or could it be something like the Town Hall?

We drove to the next town by accident

This was a fun-looking spot!

Walking courses

On the outskirts of town, now; ready to return to Beppu

But first, lunch at the Konoiwanoshō

I really wanted ice cream...

Plenty of the special; turtle soup (I just had the dangojiru)

Thanks! See you again!

So the JLPT

2015-02-04T09:00:00.001-05:00

Someday I will know my results.

Another JLPT come and gone, and results came out this week. I always resolve to talk a little bit more about it after I take the test, because honestly, something seems to get lost in the shuffle every time...with National Novel Writing Month happening in November, I often end up not thinking about the JLPT at all between October 31 and December 1. Not a great habit, I know, but one of these years...

The JLPT in Toronto administered by York University is one of two locations where the test is given in Canada. (The other is in Edmonton, AB.) Now, as a person who lives in The Big Smoke, I have no right to complain about how "far away" York is. (I may have done a little bit of complaining prior to my move here from the Atlantic provinces, though.) I can't even complain about the distance from my house, seeing how I chose to move away from Downsview the year before last. That doesn't mean that on test day, getting to the JLPT is a picnic!

So here is my advice for next year's JLPT applicants; common sense, to be sure, but maybe they're more of a reminder to myself for next year...?

Aim to arrive midway through the registration period. The lineups taper off a bit towards the middle and end of the registration period. Of course, you don't want to cut it too close, and have the TTC or something else make you too late to write the test, but too early isn't great either, and you'll be lined up awhile before sitting around for an hour just waiting. And getting nervous. Not to mention that aiming to arrive for 8 AM on a day when the subways are not running (meaning leaving my house at 6:30, meaning rising at 6) is asking for you to open up that test book and be so glassy-eyed that you don't know where to start. Don't panic if something goes wrong and you're going to get there right at the end of registration time. You have a few minutes' leeway while the orientation is taking place!

Expect to hear from York not too long after you sign up for the test. I say "not too long" because I'm not positive when it is actually supposed to come; for the last two years, I didn't receive my email with my voucher at all, and I waited far too long expecting it to come before I reached out to them. You need the voucher to write the test. Perhaps even more importantly, if you don't receive the voucher, you should still show up. Last year (2013, that is) I thought about the fact that I didn't have a voucher yet about 2 weeks before, and I contacted JLPT support. I was able to get it. This year (2014) I remembered the night before the test, as I ran through the checklist of things I needed to bring the following morning. That's why I was awake at 2 AM Googling phrases like "forgot JLPT voucher" and "JLPT York reprint voucher" and the like. I weighed whether or not it was going to be necessary to rise at 6 and go to York only to be turned away at the door. Luckily, buried somewhere on the site, I read that vouchers could be reprinted at registration. And I wasn't the only one not to receive their email - the line to reprint vouchers was much longer than any other line that morning. In short: You should receive a voucher with your test number. If you don't receive it within a few weeks of registering, ask.

Bring something to eat. This test is long and the breaks just barely give you enough time to inhale a small snack. Our group had technical difficulties and started late, which meant that our breaks were cut down. (For the final one, the time of the break's end even was shortened and changed after many of us had left the room.) It took much longer to finish the test than expected, by something like 45 minutes, and I was ravenous enough that after every section I was wolfing down Polish chocolates that I had won the night before as a prize at a Polish wedding reception. Not sure what I would have done without that Jezyki Kokos, Delicje cookies and especially Katarzynki, chocolate-covered soft gingerbreads. I might not be alive right now, without Katarzynki.

As for the test itself, I don't actually know how I did on it. That's because you need the voucher to log in online to see your results, and of course, there's no voucher in my email for me to refer back to. I emailed York to get my voucher number, but the password I was provided (generated by them, not by myself) doesn't work in the login page. So did I pass? Hard to say. I guess I'll find out when the paper results are dispatched the month after next...?

Maybe next year I will be able to choose between the JLPT and NaNoWriMo as a focus. Fingers crossed for the July version making its way east someday!

That Old JLPT Feeling

2014-10-22T17:01:00.002-04:00

I will never be an N1 Master

I have quite a few unfinished drafts hanging around in my posting queue...whoops! Things have been very very busy for me lately. I've been working a lot of overtime, ended a relationship, taken up long-distance running, gotten a cat, bought Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright. I'm pretty tired most days, so when I come home, I just want to sit at my kotatsu and space out while reading blogs. Except that a lot of the blogs I used to read daily have tapered off in post frequency or, like one of my favourites has, stopped posting entirely. While being frustrated that my daily reading content seems to be vanishing, I failed to consider that perhaps somebody out there actually likes reading my blog and was disappointed to see my posts dwindling. Well!

With that in mind, I decided today was the day for a quick post, though I suppose the topic is rather same old, same old. Last year I took a beating when I walked into the room, sat down, wrote the first section of the test, and then turned around to say to an acquaintance behind me, "Did we come to the N2 room by mistake??" It was a disaster.

This year, I tried to crack the books way back in July, with the intent to study relentlessly until October 31, and then leisurely review during November on days when I didn't have the energy for novel writing. (I don't think it's a coincidence that I have passed the JLPT and won the National Novel Writing Month challenge, but never in the same year.) Suffice to say that it's October 22 now and I'm still on Week 4 of the So-matome grammar book, with two weeks of grammar and six weeks of reading comprehension to go. I did read Chi's Sweet Home, volume 11, on the subway yesterday. That counts as study, right?

What I have been doing is kanji study, thanks to being frequently trapped on buses and trains with nothing to read and no cellphone games installed on my phone. (I was able to safely end my addiction to Hot Springs Story after beating the game for the third time.) Though there are a few apps that I've tried out before to help get daily study in, I think I've finally found "the" app for Android, and it's called KanjiSenpai. I had to turn off the drawing component pretty quickly, but otherwise I'm finding it to be really good. It uses the usual spaced repetition system (SRS) but it seems to be much better at coming back later and making sure I really know the answers to ones I guessed. Plus, it rotates between offering the meanings and the readings of compounds, as well as making you choose between several cards that are very similar, which is great for me. You can also remove cards that you're 100% certain you know - I took out number kanji, for example, and the cardinal directions, days of the week, and other kanji I use in everyday life - but the app is still going to check in with you 500 cards later and make sure you know them. If you've been looking for a good study app that will teach you the kanji rather just quizzing you on what you already learned from a textbook, this is it.

Another good one I had been using before finding KanjiSenpai was TenguGo, which cost me a dollar-something and had an interface I liked well enough. The quizzes came in small, easily-devourable packets (harder to put off studying when you can say "Meh, I'll just do one quiz,") and the tengu threw me a little on-screen party when I finished a certain number. However, it assumed you already knew all the kanji in the quiz. You can opt to "review" items (see the screenshot) but it packs just a bit too much info into its screen, and by the time I got to item #10 I had already forgotten #1. The SRS method is much better for me.

One other app I had been using before I switched to studying grammar via textbook is one called "N3 JLPT PREPARE" (yes, very descriptive) by V-Next software that does kanji, vocab and grammar quizzes. You can choose a quiz with 30 words, 50 words, 70 words, 90 words, 100 words or - not for the faint of heart - 200 words. The search function also seems good at a glance, though I never actually remember to use it. (Google Translate is always too close at hand.) My intent was to come back and use this app to quiz myself once I'd learned enough items to actually pass a quiz. Maybe it's time for a quiz right now!? I'm not getting any younger - and December 7 just gets closer and closer!

Anyone want to share their own recommendations for JLPT study apps?

Photo of the Day - Shinjuku, 1992

2014-06-01T20:47:00.000-04:00

Today I was linked to this fantastic HD video on YouTube of Tokyo in 1992. It's so clear! I really dig urban history, so I snapped a few screenshots of my favourite moments. The video includes this nice shot of Shinjuku's Studio ALTA, a look at the Rainbow Bridge during construction (!), and a Shibuya scramble crossing that's so unrecognizable that I didn't even realize right away that I was looking at the entrance to Center Gai. Wow. Check out the video, and for extra credit, have a look at this blog post about Studio ALTA, featuring a photo of the lower half of the building, in 1989!

Japanese Music in Concert

2014-03-21T12:36:00.001-04:00

For a music fan, I'm not willing to expend a lot of energy or cash to go and see a band - in fact, I'm lucky to go to a concert every 3 years at the most, and usually only shell out for nosebleed seats. However, I've actually seen a few really good Japanese bands while living here in North America. I've seen bands that would be playing sold-out shows in Tokyo, and paid next to nothing for them.

The secret is...anime conventions.

Almost all of the big conventions feature a musical act. Here in Toronto, I hit up Anime North every couple of years when they have a particularly interesting guest. I'm also in Baltimore almost every summer, and been able to see some fantastic acts at Otakon. T.M. Revolution, L'Arc~en~Ciel, JAM Project (including Okui Masami and Kageyama Hironobu, for you anisong fans out there!), Home Made Kazoku...all free with the price of admission to the convention. How good is that? When friends in Japan heard that I'd seen L'Arc, live, they were completely bowled over.

In Osaka and Tokyo, I saw ZARD and AiM and Wada Kouji - now, those last two are definitely a story for another day - but going to a see a big-name show was pretty unlikely. I just don't have that kind of interest in any one band - plus I've been lucky enough to see T.M.R. in the U.S. not once but twice, and (long after this post was originally written) even ran into him on a flight between Japan and Canada!

Quite a lot of Japanese artists have come to Toronto to perform as well - Kyary Pamyu Pamyu was here a couple of weeks ago, and though someone offered to sell me their tickets at the last minute for cheap, it wasn't enough notice to actually go. Too bad! I also missed out on B'z the year before last, which was really unfortunate. These are fairly big-name artists, though, that it'd be tough to get good tickets for in Tokyo, and here they are performing at the Sound Academy in T.O.!

New York, L.A. and other bigger North American cities also have plenty of Japanese performers who slip under the radar, both at local venues and at cons. The next time you're looking to find some new J-artists, why not check out a convention? You might be surprised at who you can get to see, practically for free!

Late

2014-02-13T17:10:00.000-05:00

But better late than never.

Hobonichi Techo Life

2014-02-13T08:30:00.002-05:00

In 2008 while living in Japan, I was finally able to play MOTHER 3, a recent (at the time) sequel to a cult hit video game that I loved as a teenager. My brothers and I owned a Super Nintendo and a copy of EarthBound, by far the house's "preferred game." Released in 1994, it was a role-playing game set in rural America, starring four "normal" kids (or as normal as spunky psychics, princes and genius teenagers can get, anyway). Years later, the sequel MOTHER 3 got a Japan-only release.

For me, it was perfect timing. Uncertain how to make Japanese-speaking friends, I had been hanging out mostly with fellow JETs and exchange students from the nearby university. I spent a lot of time in my apartment chatting online with people back home and listening to Internet radio. And as it happened, that was where I had the good fortune to meet my first real Japanese friends - not in Japan, but on the Internet.

This could turn into a much longer story (and my social life isn't actually what the post is about!) so to keep it short, I'll just say that I got involved with a certain well-known EarthBound community and encountered a Japanese fan of the game within it, Mana. She was about my age and lived in Gunma-ken, a prefecture north of Tokyo. The two of us arranged a meeting during one of my visits to Tokyo and hit it off, and from then on, whenever I was in the area, I made an effort to see her and her friends that I had gotten to know. All were fans of the MOTHER series, so I went from a fairly small amount of fandom involvement to quite a lot, very quickly.

Japan was a good place to be at the time for fans of this 20-year-old series - aside from MOTHER 3's relatively recent release, there had actually been brand-new merchandise released in arcades (Game Centers), The King of Games was selling official t-shirts out of a shop in Kyoto's Teramachi, thirty minutes from my apartment, and you could still buy the special MOTHER 3 Game Boy Micro in stores - I still regret not owning one of these! I struggled through reading the blog of MOTHER creator and copywriter Itoi Shigesato, and I went to LOFT on not one but two separate Januarys to buy his well-known Hobonichi Techo, a day planner with customizable covers and thoughtful quotes. I did not make the purchase on either occasion - after all, every year CLAIR sent us a compact, designed-for-JETs planner in the mail that I was quite fond of, and I also received a small calendar book from my school. While I wanted a techo because of the Itoi connection, I couldn't validate the expense when CLAIR's version was smaller, printed in English, and had subway maps and unit conversions on the back pages. None of the covers interested me enough to drop ¥3,500 on one, so I settled for simply looking them over whenever I visited Kyoto. There were other ways to show my MOTHER love, like this fancy colour-changing Ultimate Chimera shirt that cost an absolutely astronomical amount of money at the time.

At one point Mana-chan and friends, myself included, attended a MOTHER event in Tokyo where I even ran into into two other English-speaking members of that community, one of whom was an expat JET like me - though a CIR, not an ALT - from a few prefectures away. We hadn't really known each other at the time, certainly not enough for me to recognize them offhand, but I was completely gobsmacked to spot someone in the subway station wearing a Ness t-shirt, and rushed up to them immediately to say hello.

It's been some years since that event, and though MOTHER influences my life to this day, my active involvement has waned pretty considerably since leaving Japan. Not so of the JET I met at the event in Tokyo, Lindsay - she now translates and localizes for the company belonging to the creator of the MOTHER series, Hobo Nikkan Itoi Shinbun!

I can't tell you how awesome it is to see a fan succeed not only at entering the industry professionally, but to have the incredible good fortune (not to mention the moxie to go after it in the first place!) to work with Itoi himself. So when word got out that Hobonichi was releasing an English version of the techo, translated and localized by Lindsay, I decided it was finally my year, despite having converted over pretty thoroughly to Android's convenient Google Calendar access.

Typically, I have never been great with keeping up planners. Not since high school have I used an agenda on a regular basis. But my techo's design and ease of use (can't bring my phone into company meetings!) and stylishness and POCKETS has driven it home.


(No, I don't always save my TTC transfers!)

I use it for writing fiction ideas, dates and times and details for stories, copying the office calendar down so I can see it at home, collecting movie and concert ticket stubs, noting what foods I liked at restaurants and how much I spent, and more recently tracking Bitcoin gains and losses. I also get to use stickers I brought home from Japan and my immense Muji pen collection, and imagine my surprise when I discovered that two of the other staff in my office also have Hobonichi techos!

It's been a bit tough carrying around a book all the time when I cart around plenty of heavy things in my purse, not to mention switching from digital back to analogue again, but I'm already dreaming about putting my techo on the shelf at the end of the year and having this record of 2014 to flip through again someday...it's much more personal than reading back through Twitter logs!

I guess I can't possibly be shocked that MOTHER continues to exert that subtle influence over my days. I might even have to pull out the big guns and use some of my carefully hoarded Mr. Saturn stickers.

What are you waiting for!? Start your techo life!

Writing About Tokyo

2014-01-30T09:00:00.002-05:00

Commemorating the 1964 Olympics at Jingu Bashi

I don't think I've ever mentioned on Tadaimatte before that I had written a novel - it's true!

As you might have guessed, story writing is an outlet for me, and in 2008 while living in Osaka, I devoted quite a lot of effort to penning my first book. At the time, I was enamoured with Tokyo, and deeply interested in studying the evolution of popular culture in The Big Mikan. I went to the library in Hikarigaoka and thumbed through photos of the area from the 60s, I penned thoughtful poems about umbrellas and imagined the lives of the people bobbing through Hachiko Square, watched Rockabilly dancers in Yoyogi Park, traced the steps of Shiki and Beat and Neku from The World Ends With You, read vintage Tezuka manga, attended Comiket, visited all the shops Shigesato Itoi recommended in interviews about MOTHER, sat on the bridge at Harajuku, visited Tokyo 1964 Olympic sites, trolled Jimbocho bookstores in hopes of finding the original 1983 English translation of The Rose of Versailles, and generally fell in love with the way the city had been depicted in works of fiction. I used words like hokoten (short for hokousha tengoku) and expected people around me to actually know what they meant.

In reality, Tokyo - particularly the long trip I took alone in 2008 - was a fairly private experience, simply because I didn't know anyone else who got excited over things like Olympic plaques, croquette rolls and showa retro. I spent something like twelve days wandering the city mostly alone, with no plan, eating curry and rice balls and occasionally having only the vaguest idea of where I was going to spend the night (!). I visited Yokohama and Hakone during this memorable vacation, but spent most of it in Shibuya and Odaiba, having real "down time" in Tokyo for the first time.

One post couldn't possibly sum up how I feel about the capital...but I suppose that's why I wrote a book. I sent it around to just a couple of publishers, as it was such a specialized topic that I couldn't imagine a big company picking it up. I've sat on it long enough now, though, that I've begun to think that self-publishing is the way to go - as intimidating as that is!

So, over the next weeks and months, I'll be continuing to work on this project with the help of my good friend Zippo, and maybe soon you'll be able to download the book right here!

*edit*

And now, you can! Whoa! Check out Meet You By Hachiko on Amazon!

Tadaima!

2014-01-27T11:20:00.002-05:00

Hello, tadaima - it's been a while!

So last year I quit my telephone-jockeying work and moved on to something a little closer to my heart - being involved with the Japanese-Canadian community. While my work days are significantly more fulfilling...they are also far more full. It's hard to catch a breathing break and I certainly can't blog on the job (though I can certainly time-delay my post queues to come out in the mornings, for those of you who do have that luxury!), and the nights are filled up with cooking, commuting and my many hobbies. Plenty of Canadian hobbies (does watching British television count as a Canadian hobby?) but also getting more into the swing of things with my Japanese as well, after a long draught.

I took the JLPT last month - now that was a disaster!

I attended a tea bowl making ceremony. It's actually been almost a year since I did tea properly. Oops!

Yesterday, I carried the mikoshi (shrine) at the JCCC's New Year's Festival!

I made toshikoshi soba on New Year's with my friends.

I suppose I'd been experiencing a bit of cultural burnout, not unlike the sort of thing many JETs go through at the end of their first year in Japan. Luckily, it's been abating, and more recently I've found myself being drawn inexplicably back to writing and researching about Japan - mostly because I have a book idea swimming around my head and, of course, it's best to strike while the iron is hot! So I've been poring over books about the Japanese royal family, Tokyo in the 1970s, womens' studies in Japan and cultural revolution. Reading research material on the subway gives me a much more fulfilling feeling than playing Candy Crush Saga.

Hopefully, as a result, you guys will see more blog posts from me in future. Fingers crossed!

Yes

2013-09-18T10:21:00.002-04:00

It's almost kotatsu time--!