Konnichiwa!
Onee-chan here--that's big sister for the folks at home--guest blogging, since I am VISITING JOSH in JAPAN! It has been a whirlwind few days, one of the technological highlights of which has been getting Josh's computer up and running again, thus enabling me to report on our doings. So. Let's see.

First I traveled for about two days, all told--first a short flight to Dallas, then a long flight to Osaka seated next to a cute but not very bright 21-year-old girl who told me that her "sugar daddy," I kid you not, had paid for not only her airfare to Japan but also her laptop, ipod, and her very first real not-a-Canal-Street-knockoff Prada bag (she dangled it up for my perusal). I thought, why do I not have me one of these here sugar daddies? And then I remembered it was because I still have my self-respect. Anyway we disembarked in Osaka, where I killed a few hours at the airport by purchasing an absolutely delicious can/bottle of grapefruit juice (it tasted FRESH SQUEEZED, people), surfing internet in 10-minute intervals, calling Josh on the phone, and playing my ukulele quietly to myself while waiting for the bus ("bahs") to take me to the ferry port ("ferry poruto") where I boarded the Orange Ferry.

This is an overnight ferry that is sort of like a floating hostel--inside are small co-ed dorm rooms where you draw the curtain to your little bunk and put on the yukata robe waiting there for you, and then take yourself to the baths, where many unself-consciously naked women and girls sit on little stools soaping and scrubbing, then rinsing and soaking in the hot water pool. It is wonderful to relax and feel clean after the long flight. I am the only gaijin aboard as far as I can tell, but luckily Josh has briefed me on the proper procedure and I know to buy my little towels at the shop on the first level before going to bathe. Early morning, the ferry arrives in Toyo on the island of Shikoku, and I board a bus bound for Imabari. My gigantic suitcase blocks the aisle for everyone else and I get to practice saying "sumimasen": excuse me.

A Note on Toilets

So far in my experience, toilets in Japan have been either rather primitive--squat-style glorified holes in the floor--or bewilderingly sophisticated, with heated seats (why don't we do this?) and an array of buttons. The toilet in Cafe Verdure, where we enjoyed a lovely breakfast yesterday, featured several different buttons that each, when pressed, prompted a stream of water directed at my bottom. There must have been some subtle differences in the stream depending on the button, but Lord, for the life of me I could not tell you what they were, even after repeated testing.

So after the 2 planes, and the bus, and the ferry, and the other bus, I finally arrive at Imabari Station, where Josh appears to meet me. Yay!

Since then, numerous delicious things have ensued, which I shall try to enumerate.

1. Udon at what basically amounts to a fast-food place, but there are dried bonito flakes and fresh minced ginger as condiments, and as much green tea (o-cha) as we can drink.

2. Surprise dinner party with Japanese friends of Josh my first night, with sushi and drinks including chu-hai, a sweet girly fizzy alcoholic beverage that tastes like lychee. I want to bring this stuff home to drink for the rest of my life but I'm not sure how well it will travel. Also, I suspect this is the Japanese equivalent of Zima.

3. Breakfasts at the aforementioned Cafe Verdure and the cafe at the train station, where we ordered Viking bread, which means you can pillage the bread station as much as you want. Many croissants and strange sandwiches are eaten.

4. Mekons! Japanese clementines, small with delicate papery skin that comes off in little pieces that are now all over Josh's apartment. The man who works in one of the local Hello Kitty paraphanalia stores gave Josh two giant plastic shopping bags filled with the little oranges a few days ago, so we have been eating them constantly. Pretty much any activity is accompanied by mekon eating. Scurvy is no longer a concern.

5. Ome-rice. Imagine a fast food joint whose specialty is a cross between an omelet and rice. Ketchup might be involved. Also chicken.

6. Muscat soda! Tastes like green grapes.

7. Last night we went out to dinner with Murakami-san, one of Josh's aikido friends, and his wife and 15-year-old daughter at a really fancy nice restaurant. Murakami doesn't speak a lot of English, but he does a lot with a little. "Your wife is very nice," says Josh as Murakami is driving us to the restaurant. Murakami thinks for a moment. "Dangerous," he corrects Josh. "Does she do aikido also?" I ask. "No," says Murakami, and grins. At the restaurant we eat more food than I think is possible for me to eat in a sitting, first fried dry fish bones and little pickled things, and then delicious fresh sushi, and then the best tempura I have ever, ever tasted, and miso soup with bonito in it, and tai meshi, which is fish and rice cooked together in a little hot pot, and tall Asahi beers, and hot sake, which you have to pour for everyone else but not yourself because someone else will pour yours. Somehow the conversation is relaxed and fun and wonderful in spite of being effortful due to the language barrier--Josh is the only person at the table who is really conversant in both English and Japanese--and by the end of the meal, when Asaka, the daughter, is trying out her English a little more, it feels like we are all participating in a real moment of genuine cultural exchange. Oh, and we did some origami. I'm serious.

8. For lunch today Josh took me to to the Kaiten sushi near his house, which has plates of sushi going by on little boats in front of you, and you take what looks good, which is pretty much everything, pure white silky looking squid and squared-off pieces of buttery-textured salmon and fresh fresh shrimp, and order other things off the menu like fish eggs that pop in your mouth, and Josh is friendly with the staff who are all running around trying to fill New Year's orders because it is New Year's Eve tonight and they are busy. The wasabi is fresh and coarsely ground and penetratingly pungent; there are hot water faucets in front of every other seat at the counter so you can drink all the o-cha you want, the teabags in plastic canisters labeled "canister" though it's hard to imagine anyone's English vocab including the word, semiotics with no meaning, and there are also canisters of pickled ginger, not labeled anything at all. At the end you pay by the plate, and it comes to about $10 each for 16 plates of sushi between us and an order of edamame.

It's a good thing I like Japanese food so much, because it makes me the perfect guest. Other reasons why I am the perfect guest: I have absolutely no agenda of my own here. I love riding bikes, which is the way to get around here; it's flat and there are bike parking areas in every parking lot, which makes me happy. Oh and I did Josh's dishes. There was quite a buildup. The hot water for the dishes comes out of a box on the wall like a miniature boiler--turn it on and a flame goes on, water goes through, presto, hot water. The shower is a similar arrangement but more complicated, with a switch to turn on the gas and then a burner that goes on and a CRANK and then you can actually turn on the water. Thankfully the hot water is therefore plentiful, a blessing in an apartment that is colder than outside, more or less. I am writing this entry from beneath Josh's kotatsu table though so I'm okay.

Oh and I forgot to mention JOSH'S RADIO SHOW. Which was hilariously fun. The radio station people are super cool, and Josh and I rocked two separate segments, one at 10:30 and then one at 4 in the afternoon. My brother seems to know his way around all the equipment, which is kind of impressive, and he gets to do pretty much whatever he wants for his show. Which, this week, included making me play two Magnetic Fields songs on the ukulele, and convincing me for a few minutes that Carlos Santana was actually Japanese. "He was born in a Japanese internment camp," Josh says, deadpan, on the air, when I say, "Santana, huh? Is that a Japanese name?" We play a lot of Jollyship the Whiz-Bang, and both "Peaches and Cream" by Beck and "Cream" by Prince.

Right now Josh is putting away some laundry, and then we are going to go to the store so we can cook dinner. Later we'll end up at Imabari-Jo, the castle, to ring in the new year with everyone else in town, practically all of whom seem to know Josh. We will drink beer. It will be festive.

Yoii o toshio!
Ellie

Atatakai means WARM

Brian writes:

You can pretend, Josh, that you've never before lived in an apartment with holes in its exterior walls, but I think we both know this is not the case. Which reminds me, do they have squirrels in Japan?

God, I don't KNOW if they have squirrels in Japan.  What a good question!  Well, things they DO have include roaches big as a baby’s foot, bigger-than-life DEADLY POISONOUS CENTIPEDES, biiiiiiiig Hercules beetles, and terrifyingly big DEADLY SPIDERS.  Well, okay, I don't KNOW if the spiders are deadly, but they look big enough to capture and eat any child in the nation, easy.  The centipedes tho?  Stay away.  Actually deadly.  And like a foot long.  Black, orange legs.  Nightmares.

Anyway, if we're being technical about it, Brian, my room was the one where the floor didn't meet any of the walls (it was like, "How is the house standing?  What is the ceiling resting on?  Or the floor?  What am I standing on?  Where AM I?" ... it was better just not to think about it), and your room was the one with the squirrel door.  Oops, I mean "holes in the wall."

Then of course, there's the racoons.

Yesterday was a weatherproofing day though, and check me out: I FIGURED OUT HOW TO WORK MY HEATER!!!  I AM A GENIUSSSSSS!!!!!  It gets a lot warmer in there now, although it also smells like Kerosene.  Which doesn’t mean, “no, you didn’t figure out how to work your heater,” it just means that that’s what kerosene heaters do – they smell like kerosene.  But I got weatherstripping stuff for my sliding doors (and need to get some more – boy it helps!) and will get some for around the window panes, and I got some plasticky stuff to go under the sliding door to my room so it doesn’t squeak anymore when it slides shut (yay!), AAAAND I got a power cord for my kotatsu table!  

What the hell am I talking about?  The kotatsu is a small table with an electric heater slung underneath and draped with a special thick quilty futon that traps the warmth down around your legs as you sit.  In winter it becomes the center of family and social life here in Japan – everything happens around the kotatsu, where it’s warm and toasty.  Last night I even saw a talkshow kind of thing on TV where the twelve or fifteen folks on the show were all sat around three sides of this one massive kotatsu table, their legs stuck beneath the futon and feeling nice and cozy (while the live studio audience, I’m sure, froze watching them).  The kotatsu is supposed to have a kind of heavy panel top that holds the futon down, but mine, uh, doesn’t.  It came with the apartment, and it just, well, doesn’t have a top.  I don’t know why not.  Nor do I have a kotatsu futon; I’m just using a blanket.  These things I need to buy.  It all adds into my growing list of “how the hell did my predecessor live here for two freaking years?” questions; according to my handler Mami-chan, the person before me never used the kotatsu!  Shock!  I guess that explains why there wasn’t a power cord for it – sheesh.  The thing totally rocks though, it makes doing anything feel cozy and nice and fun.  Shopping for a top (I may just need to get a whole new one actually) and a futon are on my list for the coming week.

It is so freaking cold. And let me explain, it’s not that it’s chilly outside and then you get to come in and cozy up and escape from it, it's like you're outside, all the time. They just don’t insulate places like we do it back home – back home being “anyplace in the first world that isn’t a historical heritage site.” It’s like we’re living in caves. And you just have to think, WHY? WHYYYYY!!!! I mean, that's why people invented "inside" thousands of years ago, so you wouldn't have to be "outside" all the goddamn time. Except, you know, in my apartment, or in school, or in restaurants, or in my apartment, where as much as it may look like inside, nono, you're outside – you can tell when the wind blows, “outside,” and papers flutter around on your desk, “inside.” What the hell is the matter with these people? Do they just not know – dudes, “inside" is totally one of the best ideas ever. I think we should go back in time and find whoever invented "inside" and give them like a big prize, like a washing machine or a bubble-gum dispenser from the supermarkets or a hug, and then leave them back there in the far-gone ancient past to be revered as a God for their cache of bubblicious and their eerie knowledge these things the future man calls "hugs."

One may think of this “we are outside all the god damn time” as characteristic of the Japanese cultural mentality that lives much more in tune with the natural world and its changes than the American cultural mind ever will, but I think this is mainly a load of horseshit and that there’s no reason why my apartment should be designed with big unpluggable holes built into the walls to let the wind, rain, cold and (in summer) bugs through. Nor is there any reason, ANY CONSCIONABLE REASON, why the girls should be made to wear skirts to school year-round. Because if it’s cold in my apartment, the one place it’s colder is in school. in school, it is unbefuckingleivably cold. Yesterday at Tamagawa JH we had an anti-drug assembly in the Taikukan, which is Japanese for something like “vast-like-the-tundra and just-as-arcticly-cold-in-winter gymnasium.” The first thing they did was pull all the big shades closed over the windows and turn off all the lights. You know, so we could see the clip art powerpoint presentation. No, not so we wouldn’t notice when our neighbor solidified bodily into ice. No, where did you even get that idea from? No! Anyway, it is insanely cold in the taikukan. It’s a big airplane hanger room with metal walls and no heat, and it’s not connected on any side to the main building at school; it just sits there, rocklike in the tundra, eating the wind. So I sat in the back with the PE teacher, Kuwabara sensei, my friend at the school, and he brought his electronic pocket dictionary (which he actually bought just so he and I could talk more, which is unbelievably sweet); I think he wanted to make sure I was all up to date on my anti-drug-tactics-for-middle-schoolers stuff, like, “and if they keep on asking you to try drugs with them, say that your mom or your sensei told you not to, and if that doesn’t work, then run as fast as you can away from them!” I kid you not. Anyway, all the sensei (myself included) are in there wearing about ten layers of clothing and almost all of us are wearing our winter coats, but the students are there in their normal uniforms, jacketless even, and freezing. We can all see our breath. And there are the girls, massed on the right side of the gym, shivering quietly in their skirts and short socks while this lady cop drones on about not how tobacco may effect your speed in school races. I looked in Kuwabara sensei’s dictionary for the word “sympathy” and tried to tell him that I felt really bad for the girls, forced to wear skirts in the HELLISHLY FREEZING COLD, and he says,
“Oh, don’t worry about it. They’re young and they are very tough; they don’t even notice the cold.” I asked for his dictionary and punched in letters till I came up with what I wanted and handed it back to him. He looked at it for a minute or two, quiet, thinking, and then his face cracked as he started laughing. "So so so so so," says him, looking at the little screen. "'Bullshit.'"

No I won't Be Afraid

Okay, class.  Let’s play, “Name that movie!”  The passage below is taken from my JH 3rd year text book, and is (supposed to be) the story of a popular movie.  Take a look!

When I was 12 years old, I had three friends.  Chris, a big boy, was our leader.  Teddy had many problems.  Vern was not interested in school.  We were all different but we were best friends.  We had a tree house.  We often got together there.  
One day, Chris, Teddy and I were in the tree house.  We knew through the papers that a boy from the town was missing.  Then Vern came with some exciting news.  The boy was dead and he knew where the body was.  
     We decided to find the body before anyone else.  We wanted to be heroes.  We said to our parents, “We’ll go camping.”
     Then we left for a two-day trip along the forest railroad.
     The trip was our first adventure in the outside world.  We had a very good time.  I told my friends stories.  Only Chris, among them, saw that I had a talent as a writer.  
     As we were walking along the railroad I got to talk with Chris alone.  He often said that I was a coward, but I found out that he was worried about me.  He said, “Gordie, you should go on to college and become a writer.”  I answered, “I’m not a chicken.”  Our friends that that boys going to college were cowards.
     Then he said, “I don’t have any hopes for myself, so I want to see how your talent develops.”  I couldn’t believe these words were coming from a 12-year-old boy.  They really moved me.  
On the second day, we found the dead body.  We made a call to the police, but we didn’t give our names.  It was no longer important for us to be heroes.  When we got back to our town the next morning, it looked smaller than before.  Maybe we grew up a little.  
Some years later Vern and Teddy both died in accidents.  Chris once gave up hope for his future but he got over a lot of difficulties and tried to get his dreams back.  
Everyone was surprised.  Chris was called a coward, but he went on to college and then law school.  Now Chris is dead.  
I became a writer.  I live happily with my family.  I am still alive.  

I really love the last line.  Also, “Vern came with some exciting news.  The boy was dead!”  Yippee!!  Anyway, you guessed it (maybe).  The movie is “Stand By Me.”  When I walked in today my 3rd year team-teacher says “do you know the story, Stand by Me?”  I’m thinking, what, the movie?  Yes, the movie.  We’re doing the first page of this three-page text in class today, and she wants me, before we start, to A) EXPLAIN THE STORY TO THE CLASS, and B) DESCRIBE THE FOUR BOYS AND THEIR RELATIONSHIPS TO ONE ANOTHER, USING PICTURES I CAN DOWNLOAD OFF THE INTERNET, to make the story “more interesting to the students.”  As fucking if.  I’m sorry, what the hell am I supposed to say to the kids about the movie?  “Okay kids, see, there’s this movie but it’s nothing at all like this story, but I have no way of communicating it to you, and anyway nothing I could possibly do could possibly make what you have in front of you in any way interesting.  Here’s some pictures!!”

Now I have to go download pictures.

Yesterday at Kuwa Sho we had an emergency procedures drill, where a bell rang and the kids all duck-and-covered and then we screamed out of the building in lines by their teachers like paratroopers on the jump, assembled outside for an insanely long time while the principal talked very very slowly about, as far as I could tell, the dangers of smoking?, and then had to march through bays of running water before re-entering the building (because we wore our shoes outside). The drill was supposed to cover three kinds of emergencies: fires, earthquakes, and “crazy people coming into the school to take, kill, or attack with sticks the children and/or teachers.” Which was, I found out the hard way, no laughing matter. I mean, I thought it was momentarily, but, um, I was proven wrong. DOLPHIN! GO AWAY! DOLPHIN!!!!! Okay, he’s gone. Right, so apparently this happened in Osaka like three years ago; a crazy guy came into school and then something bad happened … I couldn’t really tell what, but something and it was bad. I think it involved sticks. I have to say, I don’t know what the hell good that drill would do against situation #3 up there. Like, you assemble the whole school and then the senseis have to fight the crazy guy off duel style to champion the kids? That would be aaaaawesome. This country rocks.

The best part of the fire drill was just after we washed our feet off to come inside; there on the ground in the doorway are towels to step on, thin and rectangular like long dishtowels. The one I’m standing on is off-white, and has a picture in pink of a woman’s shoes and the bottom few inches of her dress, cartoony-like and walking briskly across the terrycloth. Below her heels midstride it read:

“I would feel even more pretty, I think,
If only you would give me a few words of praise.”

Amazing.