nenkyuu

"Nenkyuu" is the regular paid time off that we can take throughout the year. I took it today three hours into the morning because apparently all the other teachers decided that this was the day to take off, so the office is empty and dull and my work computer's maddeningly slow.

Also, the windows are all closed and the air conditioners are set at 27 on low speed. It is a dry & breezy 26 C outside. Sorry, office, you fail at life.

There's a nice breeze coming in through my balcony door, and outside a couple of the rice fields are already being harvested. I don't quite trust this mild spell - I KNOW I remember being sweaty and gross well into Septemer last year - but it's pretty nice to not have to run the lung-fungus-inducing aircon all day. Gotta get back to working on essays, but first some observations:

Every old man driving a kei-truck looks like the guy from Waking Ned Divine (sigh...okay Grandpa Joe from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but seriously, you should see David Kelly in other things)

Parasols are useful for defense not only against the sun, but also against oosuzumebachi ("big sparrow bee," the most giantest of Asian giant hornets, which happen to live in the mountains around my town). I know this because on Monday one flew INTO my parasol, got angry with me for being in its way, and was summarily smacked down with said instrument. Then I RAN LIKE HELL.

Dirty dishes are like goombas to my Mario - I just walk away from the sink for a second and when I go back again they've respawned. Unfortunately they don't make little bloopy noises; I would probably clear them more often if they did.

Thyme looks kinda sad when it's in a bit pot all by itself.

the fall frenzy begins

Wow. Meant to type this up last night, but I zonked at 8:30 and only woke up around midnight to turn off the kitchen light. Such is JET-lag (hurrhurr see whut I did there).

After getting back from a tanfastic vacation in America-land (getting TO 'Merika was a different story entirely, but it worked out in the end, obvs.) I found myself waking up at 5 in the morning to typhoon warnings, earthquake dispersions (although apparently I'm the only doof who didn't feel a thing even though it was a 3.0 in my area), and Orientation for my prefecture's newbies. Suddenly I am a sempai lolwhut?

It's kind of amusing how the process of giving advice makes you feel like you actually know things. And at the same time it seems like this year's group is so much more on top of stuff than I remember being. Still and all, going into Orientation as a second-year was actually a good experience. Listening to the general talks a second time provided a way better setting for reflecting on my performance over the past year than that done-in-10-minutes evaluation sheet the supervisors hand out in February at the office. And when I got bored I could outline this term's classes on the back sides of handouts :b And then I took the bunch from my area out to lunch and it was good tiems, they're all very relaxed & groovy.

So, first day back at work today. We're still on "break," but from now 'til December it's the busiest part of the year, and I'ma have to stay on top of lessons, fun things like sumo tournaments, paperwork, etc. I will probably be a little crazy manic/short-fused for a while, especially during the next abominable two months of heat & humidity. I don't have the glamour of Japan-novelty to protect my spirits this time, so my plan is basically to stay indoors as much as possible until October and then get a ginormous infusion of genki from the cooling-down of everything.

At least now sunburn isn't such a big concern - the weather pattern from here on out looks something like Typhoon --> rain, Post-Rainy Season Rain --> rain, Humid As Hell --> clouds & mist, Another Typhoon --> torrential rain, repeat repeat repeat, Autumn (read: last week of October / first week of November) --> rain

alive

Just came into my mind that I hadn't posted in a while. So here I be, overall not much the worse for wear considering it's coming up on a year since I moved across the Pacific with zero training and very little idea of where I would be heading afterwards. I've learnt well enough on my feet to be an actual teacher for a few of the brighter crayons in the box, and I've better ideas about this time next year, as well as ideas about the having of those ideas. One thing you get a lot of in an inaka town connected to other inaka towns by slow-winding train tracks is time to think. And to do things. As much as this position can grate on me, I appreciate being able to work and live at pretty much my own pace.

My pace at the moment dictates milk & cookies time and a book.

8 days 'til I get to drop in for a visit stateside ~/o/

dear Japan

I want to know how to make these.

Please get me lost in one of your wee-tiny fishing villages and land me at the home of an obaachan who knows how to weave rice stalks and cloth in this fashion.
Love, Nikki



...AJ and I got to visit the town day-care center today. 4- and 5-year-olds were quite literally screaming for our attention, as they would most likely explode if they couldn't get to tell us their favorite colors & ice cream flavors. After we did a silly dance with them and gave them all high-fives on their way out of the assembly room, the head caregivers brought us to their office for tea and sweets while handfuls of children intermittently escaped from their group rooms to peek at us through the doorway c: We both got a pair of these sandals, which are what reg'lar Japanese folk used to wear way back in the day.

rhythm

It's a rainy grey day in Shima, the kind that makes you want to be inside. Except jim-jams and hot chocolate inside, not desk-computer-workplace inside :p Still, I just have my second-year culture kids today, and their teacher is overseeing a group translation of their latest reading. They do well with structured tasks, these guys (otherwise they can be a handful; all that unfocused energy and whathaveyou) and I'm glad their new sensei is an instructor who can handle that.

I'm starting to get the rhythm of this year's classes, I think. Not all my first-year communication lessons work, but the rate-of-epic-failure is dropping and the students are starting to voluntarily participate without so much teeth-pulling. As I recall, the previous co-teacher and I were still having to call out student numbers pretty much every day throughout fall term.

With the second-year class I can not-stress for a change, because they've a Japanese teacher who is actually willing and able to take charge of their education, take at least this portion of it in some direction. The third-years are pretty chill and the girls just want to know everything, and the boys are pretty well-behaved for teens but then again there are only three and my girls will actually out-volume them c: Two of them, I can tell, are really interested sometimes. They just can't let it show, or the one who took this class purely to get out of math distracts them. But it's by far the smoothest-running class, is third-year culture.

In August I get a new beat - the Ise-Shima/Minamiise JETs, particularly the newbies. A while back our current regional advisor dood called for a show of hands as to who'd like to replace him, and I guess it was just me and another guy. I was perfectly content to let other-guy take it, as I'd only really volunteered in the exceptional case that NOBODY else would, but apparently the people up in the Tsu office thought differently. And final decision's theirs, so, tag, I'm it.

blips

I haven't made a real picture-laden post in a while now, I think not since I put up those terrible and pity-evoking shots of my empty apartment when I first moved in and had no clutter stored up around the edges like cushy, subcutaneous fat deposits.

So here be some things:

1) wee-tiny kwabs be back in town. This one don't take no sass!
B) a gecko I found chillin' on the stairway handrail one afternoon. He'd just recently lost his tail, as you can see, little bud's just starting to come back in. He let me poke him and pet him a bit, probably thinking the whole time ohgodohgodohgod what is this horrible thing touching me please don't eat meeeeeee;

iii) a birdbatterfly. They seem to be all over Mie - I just saw one in Kumano over the weekend (I will look up their real name some day, wait no of course I won't, it can't be as good as this one I made up) They are generally not very obliging photo subjects, but this one had some flowermunchies to snack upon and keep it (relatively) still. It was the size of my hand, fingers splayed, and it was so drunk on nectar it nearly bumped smack into my head quite a few times;

and Δ) something NOT alive but flora-related, sorta, a painting I started a humiliatingly long time ago. It's going to get done and then it's going in a closet somewhere, and meanwhile I am starting a new project or two and not letting this old thing haunt me with its staleness and my failure to make it better.

Tomorrow I'm making a day-trip into Osaka that can't get too expensive, because I forgot that when Japan has public holidays, Japan's ATMs take public holidays as well; they dun' work and you can't get to 'em anyway 'cause the banks and bank-corners are all closed. Konbinis still operate, obviously, but Nicole and I have had some issues with finding Hyaku-Go-friendly stores in O-town. Helps when the ATM actually services your bank.

Anyway I am stocking up on chili-beans and diverse&sundry food-goods, for in a recent attempt to make myself some delicious chili, I inadvertently created the best Sloppy Joe recipe ever. EV-ER. No, internet, you can't have it, I'munna make a million dollars. ...Also I have to remember exactly what I did first (.__.)a

Chaahan (fried rice) tonight was in general a success (it was DELICIOUS, thanks for finally getting me the recipe, AJ!), only gum in the gears being that I tried to add some chopped bok choy to it and it weren't havin' none of that, taste-wise. Silly rabbit, bok choy is for stews.

My legs are not as tired as I thought they'd be

This weekend I went exploring, which I have not done in a long time because I spent the previous 4 weekends going to places that are not my town.

Yesterday I took the local train down to Where The Train Tracks End, because if you go any further you will plow straight into the Pacific Ocean. That place is called Kashikojima, and it is full of pearls and ise-ebi (lobster), and regular ebi (shrimp), too. The station is right next to the wharf and its jumble of shops, and it smells of kelp and sea salt.

Today I discovered the hill behind my apartment. I mean I'd always known it was there, and that I could walk along a portion of it to get to work faster, but only recently did I notice a kei-truck parked up on a rise of ground that upon further inspection proved to be an unpaved road of sorts. It branches off the old paved road that I walk along normally, which disappears beneath my school's baseball field. So today I decided that before I went to the store I'd see where that little dirt track leads. Turns out it just winds alongside the marsh behind the school grounds and dead-ends after you walk through a creepy clearing where I-don't-know-what goes on, and then an archway of new bamboo.

But there is a footpath that continues onward, into mystery and adventure. I didn't have my camera with me, but this wasn't the sort of exploring I could really do justice to using a camera. Anyone who visits me from now on, I am bringing you by the rough and unbeaten track up that hill. Except it will probably never again be this kind of cool, sunny, sleepy day in early spring when there aren't enough insects to be a bother and the animals are still lying low and nobody is working the tiered orchards planted up there and it's so quiet, that whole piece of the world just dozing.

Still, we're going for a hike.

The last bit of walking I did was along the river bank on my way home from the store. I guess since today was pretty warm and sunny a lot of the older neighborhood residents were camped out with big buckets and nifty contraptions made of either bamboo or plastic tubing and fine mesh. They were catching little fishies, like minnows except I dunno the Japanese version of minnows, scoopin' 'em up with the mesh traps. Given the things I've seen at the store, though, I can't say with any certainty whether they actually intend to use them as bait for bigger fish, or just eat the little guys. Maybe both.

J-TV

There's a half-hour animal special on every Sunday night after NHK's news. It features a little mini-bio of one animal or another, with interjections from a character called Hige-ji, or "Uncle Beard." As you might imagine, this guy is a squat, talking beard with a little green feathered hat.

Anyway, like many Japanese TV programs, this show is fond of using random American songs as background to the narration / featured events.

And tonight the nest-building background music for Australia's Great Bowerbird was the orchestral background track of "That's How You Know" from Disney's "Enchanted." Of course. Naturally.

I don't particularly like the word "serendipity," but it fits

On my way home from work today, I stopped by a little school supplies shop. It's run by an older woman, and sits on the corner where I turn off the main road and down a narrow back way that takes me to the Ise road by my apartment.

I gave the lady who owns the place 660 yen for two pens and a couple packs of stationary, and she gave me a good 15 minutes out of her day, a little jingly cow charm, and her sincere wishes for my dreams to come true. Every time I answered a question she would exclaim that I'm exactly like her own daughter - early 20's, only child, working in a foreign country before going to graduate school - and that even though my mother lives far away in America, she knows exactly how she must be feeling. She frequently patted my arm in a quite maternal fashion. It was like we had known each other for years, but we never even exchanged names.

Today was chilly, dreary, and really dragged towards the end since I'd only had 4 hours of sleep & the office was nearly deserted. But it's days like today that make me feel a bit better about living in the inaka for another year.

Miscellany

Oh, the world is full of words that I love ♥
Such as "vertiginous," 「ときどき」(tokidoki), and "recherche"

I played a word-game with my second-years today that's like a cross between hot potato and musical chairs, only English words are the potatoes and the music is from the original "Batman" TV series. The penalty for being the one caught out is they have to answer a conversational question in English. I have questions of varying levels, from "What is your name? What is your quest? What is your favorite color?" etc. to "Do you think there are aliens on other planets?" Can't wait to get to that one.

Also can't wait to get to Ise this weekend - LaLa Park, woooo! Just like all the other hojillion Aeon shopping complexes in J-pan, except I've actually bought stuff at this one and it's called "LaLa Park" XD

This is either another instance of "Japan is weird," or "goddamn I'm getting old already" - remember when you used to sometimes find Cracker Jacks or little plastic toys in the cereal box? Guess what I found in mine. Go on, guess. ok i'll tell you, jeez

Unfortunately I have not watched it yet, as my laptop has just run out of DVD region changeovers, but I'll bet it's CRAZY AWESOME FUN TIMES WITH PENGUINS.

Speaking of crazy awesome animals, meet the newest addition to my menagerie (another good word, but I just can't love it like I love mélange):

Who's a sciatic little Tamandua? Yes you are! (somehow the seaming on his back made him curve a little to the right...I like to think it gives him character, though)

I sent the pattern to Ku to be all digitechnofunkisized, thus why I am not able to share it at the mo', but fear not, soon all y'all crafts-inclined type persons can make your very own army of southern / lesser / vested anteaters.
Sorry for springing that on ya, Ku, but many thanks for the postcard. And yes, you can start building that joint USPS - JPS shrine now, because your Vegasoid-monstrosity-card DID get through them both and here's proof:And now it is HIGH time I started making dinner, 'cause there's gonna be a busy day of inaugural events taking place around midnight my time. GUESS WHO'S STAYING UP TIL 2 AM ON A WORK NIGHT I'll give you three chances and the first two don't count (.__.)a

Happy Moo Year

Yes, we are neck-deep into week 1 of the Year of the Cow (or "ox" if you wanna be all old-school, but cows are moar cute yuh-huh). It's supposed to be my year. Thus far it's been a mixture of awesome and failure. Awesome mostly coming from my winter vacation in the FROZEN NORTHLANDS Oh My God Snow!!!! :D And chocolate, and REAL cheese, and sloppy joes for dinner & waffles for breakfast, and fireplaces, and homey Midwestern-Americans who pronounce their o's kinda funny but at least they don't need to keep giving me verbal cues to constantly reassure me that our social relationship is A-OK.

Not that I didn't miss Japan. I totally missed out on New Year's Eve + sunrise at Ise's sun-goddess shrine, and that only happens once a year :c Also I missed the national transportation system that actually works. Most of the time. When I don't bork my timing. That was the failure I mentioned way up there ^

After a day of risking pulmonary embolisms in planes, (for some reason I never think "ohmygod what if the plane crashes????" - it's always "ohmygod what if the blood in my legs clots because I can't goddamn move and it gets into my lungs or my brain and I DIE????" I'm getting aisle seats from now on, because apparently nobody in the world has properly functioning kidneys anymore so they NEVER PEE or get up to do anything EVER and I'm stuck feeling like a jerk 'cause I made the 6'8" guy who just found the one comfy position in his undersized seat move to let me out again) I was finally in familiar territory in Nagoya. Express train from airport to main city station, express train from main city station home. Easy.

Except I took the wrong express train home. Not really the WRONG one, just the one that left for Toba 13 minutes too late to catch a local train back to my town. And by "left for Toba" I actually mean "left for Ujiyamada and you have to take the local Toba train to actually get to Toba." In my defense, I hadn't eaten for about 4 hours and used those 13 extra minutes to find food.

Totally against my defense, though, I'm already well-versed in the weasely bait-and-switches Kintetsu likes to pull with their train service, so I really should have just hopped the first train back to be safe. I knew better. In my defense again, though, 15 hours of airline travel. Brain not working at full capacity.

Oh well. All the craptacular travel experiences Japan can throw at me (and really that's been the only one thus far, and not nearly as harrowing as being stranded somewhere in the States or, yanno, any other country that's not Japan. Both of which have happened before) won't take away from the awesome winter break I had. Movies and music and hanging out and sleeping in, and even though I am contractually obligated as a former Chicagoan to forever grudge Macy's their blackhearted takeover of Marshall Field's, I DID find an awesome fitted shirt there, and a jacket as well, both on sale thank you shopping mojo <3

So, to wrap up, things the new year holds:
shopping mojo (always)
little ceramic cows that go "dingle-dingle-dingle!"
enough Americana to last for the next 18 months
books, books, all kinds of books! (thanks, Mom & Dad!)
grad school apps
new first-year students
at least 3 new babies (lots of young married teachers in my office)
at least 1 new prime minister (lolz j/k...or AM I???)
AT LAST a new president
adventure, alliteration, serial commas, and onomatopoeia

The correct answer is, "No."

Just so you know, if any Japanese people ever catch you eating something native to the country / easily obtainable locally and ask you "Do you like that?"

Sometime last week I brought a kiwi to work with my lunch. The teacher who sits on my right asked me if I liked kiwis, and I said "Yeah they're tasty!" and happily munched away on it. I thought the exchange had ended there, but this morning he comes in to work and pulls out a big plastic bag full of kiwis he'd bought . . . I dunno, somewheres. Wholesale, apparently. I keep forgetting how close to New Zealand we are.

Anyway, it's not uncommon for the teachers in my office to bring in a sack full of fruit and pass it around, but usually it's native stuff like mikan (teeny-weeny sweet little seedless oranges that grow all the hell over Western Japan. In Isobe, any home-owner lucky enough to have a yard has either a mikan or a persimmon tree in it, possibly both). So I took out a kiwi and gave the bag back so he could pass it to the next desk over. But he shook his head and gave it back, and said "No no, that's all for you!" There are like 20 kiwis in this bag! I don't know how I will find time to eat them all before they start going squidgy.

Then around lunchtime I went downstairs to the school's lunchfood stand, which is a little office near the student entrance that sells sandwiches and [any pastry you can think of here]-with-[any food you can think of here]-filling concoctions and onigiri, which are what the Japanese invented by way of sandwiches using rice balls instead of bread slices. They come wrapped in little seaweed ribbons so they won't stick to your other onigiri / foodstuffs and hey, bonus nutrition from the seaweed!

I bought a curry-filled-bun and was going to be on my way, when the lunch-lady, whom I have literally seen only twice thus far, today being the second time, called me back and handed me a big paper bag full of mikan. I don't know how she heard that I like mikan, because all she asked me before handing me the bag was if I HAD any mikan. Of course I said no, because all I had at that time were apples and bananas in the apartment and a huge-frickin'-sack full of kiwi in the office. And now I have mikan for days! I just ate one in my dinner tonight, with some spinach and lemon-baked chicken. Kind of a rudimentary "Asian" chicken salad, I guess :p

In conclusion, Japanese people love feeding me.

秋まつい

This morning I woke up rather late, as is my wont on the weekends, and popped in a load of laundry. I hang most of it inside nowadays as it gets pretty chilly at night / in the early morning, and there hasn't been a lot of sun lately.

So, second load goes in, I go to the store to stock up on veggies and such. I usually pass Isobe's main shrine on my way into town. Lately it's had some construction work done - new stone steps, and some kind of big sign that wasn't unveiled until today. I wasn't aware somehow, but today and tomorrow are Isobe's Fall Festival (aki matsuri) days. Instead of a quiet, empty shrine on a hill, this is what I saw this afternoon.

The people on stage are taking turns pounding mochi, a sort of paste that's made from rice and used to make sweet cakes in the autumn. The first mochi-pounding of the season is a very special deal :3 At that point I went on my way to get foods, because I need foods to live, but I very quickly ran them back to the apartment, put on a nicer jacket and my panda-hat, and got back to the matsuri. A few of my high school students did a hip-hop dance routine towards the end of it. For some reason, hip-hop dances are VERY popular amongst younger people in Japan. Girls as young as 7 or 8 will go up on stage in baggy pants, bandanas, hoochie shirts & arm-warmers and do synchronized dance moves that their grandmothers probably wouldn't approve of. It's one of those things about Japan that I will just never understand, in the way that Japanese people will probably never fully understand why "otaku" is a label young people in America enthusiastically claim for themselves.

Anyway, clash of cultures aside, I (mostly) enjoyed the dancing. There were several very adorable groups of older women in traditional dress, doing slow and dignified autumn dances. Sorry I can't show any pictures of that; my cell phone camera is retarded for some reason and any pictures I take sideways won't un-sideways-ify themselves when I transfer them to my computer. I also saw Masako at the festival. I think she'd gone to cheer on a few of her friends who were dancing. And also for the wholesale fruit that I unfortunately failed to notice until I got back from the store. Bag-fulls of apples for 500 yen! Apples, bananas, persimmons the size of your face, you name it. Masako offered me some fruit from her bag-fulls, so now I have the most delicious first-harvest apple I have ever eaten in my tummy, and the biggest persimmon I have ever seen sitting on my kitchen counter.

The next few weeks are going to be a little hectic. AJ and I have been so spoiled with three-day weekends and half-days of classes for the past several weeks that a full week's schedule suddenly seems kinda overwhelming. But we've just gotta make it until December 4th - that's when final exams start, and thus when fall session classes end. The trimester system is awesome on the other side of the teacher's desk.

インフォメーションGET!!!

First off, yes: I'm alive. Yes: I like my new town pretty well. NO: I DON'T HAVE INTRONET YET D:

BUT HOW AM I MAKING THIS POST??? (lolallcaps)

My ALT-sempai (that's senior assistant language teacher) was kind enough to invite me over for dinner & for to make use of his interwebbernets connection, which is far faster than what is available at the school where I work. Also, the school doesn't want me bringing my personal laptop to work and hooking it up, because I guess they're afraid of spreading viruses or something. So I have a dinosaur of a laptop to use there (if Jenni is reading this, remember your old laptop? EVEN SLOWER). It can't handle image-laden websites, or even very large images for that matter. I froze it up today just trying to load a desktop-sized picture of Navy Pier.

But anyway, back to the low-down on my new digs.

I have a little one-bedroom apartment that's out on the main road between Ise and Shima (Ise being chock full o' shrines, and Isobe, the part of Shima where I live and work, being chock full o' liquor stores and old people as far as I can tell). When I figure out how to stick pictures in the middle of posts, I'll update this post with some shots so you can have visual aids to supplement your vibrant imaginings.

SURPRISE UPDATE! PICTUARS ARE HEAR :B

This is what I wake up to every morning. Mountains, greenery, and the sun streaming through my hideous pastel-flower curtains at 5 in the morning. I'll upload more pictures of my bedroom once it's redecorated a bit so it is fit to evoke admiration rather than pity. The good news is the tatami mats are clean. There are spiders living under them, but I figure they keep the really nasty bugs from taking over the spaces beneath my floors, so they can stay down there. I'm certainly not going in after them.


Kitchen / "lounge area" - directly behind me is the TV and a sliding door that leads out onto a patio just large enough to hold my wee-tiny washing machine & racks for drying clothes. That big yellow plastic tube you see in the foreground is a toxic powder that you spread about outside your domicile in an ancient Japanese voodoo ritual to ward off crawly things. Actually, it doesn't ward them off so much as guarantee that if they walk across the chalky white line and enter your living space, they will succumb to the malice of evil spirits sometime within a week or so. Maybe.

Anyway, at $230 a month this place would be a steal by any American's standards, and to someone like myself who has become accustomed to living out of a single room with a stacked bed-and-workspace and one sink on the far wall, it almost seems like too much space. Almost. I've managed to make a pretty spectacular mess of it thus far, so I would say the settling-in process is going quite well.

However, the previous occupants either didn't see fit to clean it . . . EVER . . . before they left, or it has been vacant for a looooooong long time, because when I first walked in the smell from the shower room was ominous, to say the least, and everything in the kitchen/TV area had a disturbing stickiness about it that humidity alone just couldn't account for. I won't even talk about the stove top, since the landlord has since replaced it with a shiny new one that makes me very very happy because that's one less surface to sanitize. I am also happy to report that I have a gas stove, so cooking is not so much of an ordeal as it could be, although the heat and humidity tend to make the prospect of preparing hot food quite disenchanting.

Anyway, so far the local insect population has seen fit to keep to the outdoors. Everywhere outdoors. All over the building, the stairs, the walls, the lights . . . but there are no monstrous bird-eating spiders or poisonous centipedes or wee-tiny little tatami mat bugs inside. The little tatami mites ("dani") are actually probably the worst pests you could find indoors, because they're too small to see, they bite you all over during the night, and they're at the bottom of the food chain for all the other wriggly crawly nasty beasties you don't want to see in your room. You learn about so many fun things living out in the boonies in Japan.

I do love the nature, though, for the most part. There are cute little crabs roaming about the "river" (actually more of a salty backwash from the sea that runs through a weedy ditch outside my apartment building) that wave their tiny arms at me whenever I pass by and startle them, and rumor has it there are monkeys in the little arm of forest that cuts into my neighborhood. The other day from my window I saw a Japanese raccoon-dog napping outside in the shrubbery. It was quite possibly the cutest animal I have ever seen, something like a cross between a marten and a big brown fox with black stripes across its eyes, black limbs, and a skinny little tail. Apparently they're very common around wooded areas, and Isobe is pretty woodsy. There's a short-cut to my high school up a hill and through a patch of bamboo forest that grows up to the baseball fields behind Shima High School. It's a little rough, but it gets me to work in 15 minutes instead of 25, taking the long way around down the large roads with no sidewalks. Also it's cooler under the trees, and there are always pretty emerald dragonflies with black wings fluttering about.

Since it's still summer vacation in Japan, I won't have any classes until September, which means I pretty much sit around all day at my desk, reviewing my old Japanese textbook and attempting to make small-talk with my co-workers. They're all very nice, thankfully, nothing like the frigid, enigmatic, alien beings we were warned about during the big JET orientation in Tokyo. The orientation sessions kinda reminded me of the talks we had to attend at Nanzan University for foreign students, in that the negative aspects of culture-shock and the possibility of terrible things happening were way overblown (re: the infamous "Japan is not safe" presentation that has been the subject of much mockery amongst my group of Nagoya-buddies). I'm not feeling too isolated despite the language barrier and the fact that I'm living in the inaka ("heart of the rice field," literally; in more colloquial America-speak, "the sticks"). I don't feel shunned and unwanted by my co-workers. My supervisor and several of the teachers speak very good English. I have another JET at my school who's been here a year and can help me figure stuff out. By Tokyo-Orientation standards I'm living in a fantasy world.

Heart of a rice field! That's my apartment right there. Despite what lies perspective might be trying to impress upon you, there's actually no direct way to get to it from the main road (hint: this little footpath right here is not "the main road" - it's that dark line running through the middle of the picture). You have to walk past it and down a little side street to get to the driveway what leads to the apartment parking lot. It's a little bit inconvenient, but I would much rather see cranes wading in the reeds outside my window than blacktop or concrete.

I haven't been able to compare experiences with my fellow Mie prefecture JETs yet, except to some extent Nicole, since I have her phone number. I've started using my old cell phone from Nagoya, but because it's so out of date and I don't have my foreign-resident ID card yet (affectionately referred to as "the gaijin card") I can only use a prepaid SIM-card - the cell phone companies won't let an undocumented immigrant contract with them. What gives, right? That's downright un-American. To be fair, I am actually pretty well-documented. I'm just waiting on the bureaucracy now.

This also means that I can't get a phone company to hook up internet service at my apartment yet. If my local city hall is to be believed, my gaijin card won't be ready to pick up until August 14th. Which means I can't apply for internet service and a cell phone contract until then. Which kind of really bites. 'Cause that means I can't really use Skype unless I'm ganking AJ's intarwebz at his place, and even though he's invited me I've already soaked up enough Japanese sensibility to feel bad about imposing. But my supervisor and I have done all we can; now it's up to the government. That's never a phrase you want to use.

The plot thickens

Recently, I found out that I will be living in Isobe-cho, a town within the only-technically-a-city of Shima. Apparently Shima formed back in 2004 when five towns situated relatively close together decided "Hey let's become a city why not!", and from then on everything was completely changed forever. Except the towns are still towns, and they're still the same distance apart, and the only thing that's different is now there's an administrative / geographically conceptual entity known as "Shima-shi" encompassing it all. But anyhoo, that's all pretty boring and bureaucratic. What's really of interest is this:

Although it's officially part of the Chubu region of Japan (again, technicalities . . . they screw up everything) Mie Prefecture, where Shima is located, has traditionally been considered a part of Kansai (which for some reason the government recently decided to re-name "Kinki," a fact which causes me no end of immature giggling). The fun thing about Kansai is that the people there speak a regional dialect of Japanese that sounds pretty weird to speakers of standard Japanese. Yes, like Uh-murr-i-kuh, Japan has its own brand of southerly redneck-speak. And this is known as Kansai-ben.

For those of you without any Japanese experience, let me flip the scenario around. Imagine a Japanese person who has taken a few years of lessons in standard American English. Now imagine that person leaving Japan to go live in Mississippi. The comparison isn't completely sound - for instance, no incidents of culture-shock in Japan can compare to the horrors of the Deep South - but the linguistic confusion factor is basically the same.

Since Shima is on the edge of Kansai and fairly close to Nagoya, I'm hoping that the regional speech patterns will bear more in common with Nagoya-ben than full-blown Osaka-ben (yes, specific cities can have their own particular flavor of dialect, too, just like Boston or Chicago. My friends and I got called out a lot in Tokyo for our Nagoya "accent." We didn't even realize we had picked it up). After a couple clumsy weeks of struggling to remember the Japanese I've already learned, I'll probably be alright communication-wise. My co-workers and neighbors will of course understand my standard Japanese with a smattering of leftover Nagoya-ben, and their accents probably won't be too strong. Nevertheless, I'll be printing off some Kansai-ben word lists to look over during the first few weeks at school - the kids are still on summer holiday and thus there won't be much to do besides work on my self-introduction for the opening of the school year.