The Misadventures of José Faxner

1. Drug Store’s

2. Billy the Kids

3. Pub DIVORCE

So, this past weekend we finally got our first snow here in Akita. The whole thing felt quite peculiar for two reasons:

1. The first snow actually stayed on the ground, even overnight!

2. Whether it was a direct result of it starting to snow or not I wouldn’t be able to tell, but at that same moment, it had become winter.

It’s kinda difficult to explain, but going outside today and yesterday, the air just felt really different from what it has up until now. It was cold in a way that it hasn’t been before, but more than anything the air just felt a lot fresher. After a few months of air way more humid and stuffy than I’m used to (although I’m admittedly somewhat used to it by now), it felt quite refreshing. The snow doesn’t reach more than a few inches at the most at this point, but I’m pretty curious to see what the coming months have in store. I’ve heard stories of 2 metres of snow in January/February, and that sounds a bit exciting even for a hardened winter veteran like myself.

Not everyone at this school is used to being blessed/cursed with four different seasons, though, and I think more than anything it’s going to be fun for me to see what these people are going to go through in winter. Although I normally don’t think very highly of snow (it helps with the overwhelming darkness of winter, but that’s about it as far as positives go), this new weather has made me strangely sentimental. Seeing a group of people playing in the snow, presumably for the first time in their life, was surprisingly emotional and in a way made me feel like a kid again; I couldn’t wait to get out there and join them. It’s kinda weird considering I never really enjoyed going out playing in the snow… but considering how everything else is backwards in this country, I suppose it’s just natural.

Have a load of this:

So I cut my hair some time ago. This is what I look like now (or like, two weeks ago, anyway):

Judging from people’s reactions, I guess no-one in Japan has seen a mohawk before. Of course, I had expected the occasional double-take, and customary compliments - if you cut or dye your hair, wear new clothes, or, well, do anything to look different, it’s かっこいい (kakkoii, “cool”). However nothing could prepare me for the reactions that I would get - as I walked into the cafeteria, people… applauded. Like, seriously, shouting and wooing, and applauding. It was quite surreal. I mean, I like to think I’ve done a few applause-worthy things in my life but somehow this doesn’t seem like it’d be one of them. Apart from feeling somewhat awkard I sure didn’t mind it though… the whole thing just seemed pretty funny.

I like my new hairstyle though, and seemingly, so does other people. For what it’s worth, I suppose if being a freakishly tall foreigner didn’t make me stand out in a crowd, this at least will. Granted, Akita probably isn’t at the cutting edge as far as subcultures (or simply weird looking people) go, but I’m still amazed at how big a deal it seems to be. Whenever I meet someone for the first time, I’d say probably a good 70% start off with “so what’s up with the hair?” or some variant thereof (the other 30% being mostly even split up between “Why did you come to Japan” and “How tall are you” (185cm, for the record), and with a dash of “What kind of woman do you like”).

That last one might sound like a joke, but seemingly it’s considered perfectly normal introductory chit-chat in Japan; or at least when talking to foreigners. I really don’t know if they ask expecting to hear something absolutely outrageous, or if it’s just considered one of those things you have to know about someone before you know where you have them. Either way the question has a tendency to always just leave me completely stumped… And when asked by a group of Jr. high school girls (like it was today), the reply is gonna be awkward no matter what it is.

As I mentioned, yesterday, we went on a field trip with the school. All of the new international students, as well as some of the Japanese students went for a bus trip to a couple of interesting places in the vicinity of the school.
We were so many people (around 110 or so), so we had to take two buses. For the first (and last) destination of the trip, the buses split up; our group first went to a sake brewery. I’d expected some sort of big factory or something, but it turned out to be a rather inconspicuous, Japanese style house. Once we got inside, we were divided into two smaller groups, and while the others were given a tour of the premises, my group were treated to some of the apparently famous Akita sake. As any friend of mine could tell you, I’m not really a big fan of alcohol… but this actually wasn’t bad! The flavour kind of reminded me of white wine, but I definitely liked this better than most white wines I’ve ever tried. As we were drinking the sake, we had some time to look around a bit. There were a couple of these really cool classic Japanese style rooms with the tatami mats, low tables and sliding doors and everything. I don’t know what they’re used for, but they sure looked nice.

Eventually we were let into the actual brewery part of the building, for the grand tour. We were shown all these rooms, machines and other stuff, and were given explanations on how sake is made. In all honesty I hardly remember anything of what we we’re told, so if you’re dying to know how sake is made, go look it up on Wikipedia or something. The tour was fun though, as we got to see all kinds of neat stuff, as well as get yet another taste of Japanese hospitality; as we went into the brewery, we were asked to take off our shoes, and wear slippers. When we went to the second floor we had to put on another pair of slippers. Now, get this - during the two minutes we spent in the room on the second floor, someone actually went and turned all of our slippers around, so we could just step into them. Simply amazing. As Wei Wei put it: “If this was back in Germany, the shoes would’ve been stolen!”
After that impressive showing, we went to some kind of mall or something to have lunch. I was really hungry at this point, and was somewhat discouraged to see what we were being served: two onigiri (おにぎり, rice balls). Onigiri can be pretty nice, but these left a little to be desired. One of them had a salmon and sesame filling, which could’ve been really nice had it not been sitting in a bus for half a day. The other one though, had umeboshi (梅干, pickled plum), and can only be described as vile. The situation wasn’t improved by the fact that I had (perhaps naïvely) assumed the onigiri didn’t have any filling, only to take a big bite out of it and dig my teeth into this horrifyingly foul thing in the middle. I’d tried nattou, an infamously hard-to-appreciate Japanese food, earlier, and while I didn’t like it - the umeboshi was even worse. Still, I was starved, so I somehow endured and ate the whole thing.
After that pitiful excuse for a lunch, we went to Kanmanji Temple (蚶満寺). It was a really beautiful place, with all kinds of cool buildings, buddhas, wildlife, and a bunch of cute cats to boot. Some people even prayed, or made wishes or something, but I didn’t want to risk offending anyone by being the stupid gaijin who does it all wrong, so I just went around and took some photos instead.

Next stop was Mt. Chokai (鳥海山). Supposedly the view is great, but due to the weather, we didn’t really get to see that much at all. That didn’t stop us from having a good time, though. The souvenir shop had these awful, gaudy - and of course hilarous - tourist t-shirts… Naturally we had to get some. I was unfortunately unable to change on the spot, but you can see Carl’s awesome “KISAKATA TRIATHRON IN AKITA” t-shirt, at least. The greatness didn’t end there, though, as the place had some wicked vintage arcade machines as well. Sadly none of them were running (whether they were not working or simply disconnected I’m not really sure), but they were still really cool to see.

The journey continued as we went to the coast of the Japan Sea, to the place of “16 Buddhas”, where some priest had a bunch of Buddha sculptures carved into the cliffside a 150 or so years ago. The place was really cool, and I actually really enjoyed the smell of the ocean. It’s something I haven’t experienced in a long time, so it was really nice. Somehow the smell of ocean just feels like “summer” to me.
After taking a bunch of photos and generally just messing around by the Buddhas for a while, we departed for the final destination for the trip; Shirase Kinenkan (白瀬記念館), a memorial hall and museum dedicated to Shirase Nobu and the Japanese Antarctic Expedition of 1911-12. We started off with a movie about the history of antarctica (entierly in Japanese, of course), of which I couldn’t really understand anything. That was followed up with another film showing auroras. It would’ve been nice, if it weren’t for the fact that it was projected onto the ceiling, and I was sitting in the front row, meaning I had to bend over backwards to see anything. Once the film finished, we were free to wander about the museum for about half an hour… but in all honesty it was really neither that big or interesting. One thing that was really fun though, was that we found a display telling about a member of the expedition called Tsuchiya Tomoji (土屋 友治)… who almost shares his name with my friend Tsuchiya Tomomi (土屋 友美)! Turns out they’re both from Yamagata prefecture as well. Tomomi seemed a little spooked by it, but I think she managed to see the fun in it like the rest of us.

About an hour’s bus ride later, we were finally back to campus, to have some long awaited dinner. It’d been a very long and tiring day (possibly not too much unlike this post), but of course a very fun and interesting one as well. I really hope I’ll be able to back to Mt. Chokai later in the fall, as it’s supposed to be very beautiful once the leaves start turning red.

In case you missed the previous entry, you can check out all of my photos from my field trip HERE.

So, today we went on a field trip, to all kinds of places near the school. A sake brewery, the coast of the Japan Sea, an Antarctica Museum, and a few other locations. I’m waay too tired to actually write anything about it now though, so I’ll just give you a link to my photos (temporarily hosted on Photobucket until I get my own gallery working on this site). I’ll try to write a proper report on the day tomorrow.
Check out photos HERE.

So, here we are. After a bunch of dilly-dallying, my blog is finally up for everyone to see. Granted, there’s really not much to see at this point, but at least you all know that I’m alive. I figured I’d write some sort of summary of the last couple of weeks before starting to blog proper… but I probably won’t, for the exact same reason I put it off in the first place - there’s just been too much stuff going on to describe it all without going nuts in the process. So I guess I’ll just sort of make a few comments on what’s happened so far in passing, or something. We’ll see, I suppose. Really, I’m already writing more now than I thought I would, so, um, I might as well keep going and briefly tell you a little about my current situation.

If anyone had managed to miss it, I’m currently in Akita, Japan, to spend a year at Akita International University, studying Japanese. I arrived here at the 28th of August, and after an arduous week of orientation, picking classes and learning how to find my way around campus, classes started at September 4th. I’m having a really good time so far; the campus is beautiful, people are really nice and the food is delicious (although the size of the servings are pitiful at times). I’ve already made a lot of friends (arguably more than I ever did during my two years in Gothenburg), and somehow I just feel really at home at the school. I really haven’t gotten into the whole “getting up before noon” thing (or the “studying” one, for that matter), and having rice three times a day does take some getting used to, but all things considered I’m really enjoying my stay so far, and I really look forward to spending my next year at this place.

In closing, just a small technical note: The structure for the blog isn’t really finished at this point - it’s supposed to be completely bilingual (the interface as well as however many posts I can be bothered to translate), but I haven’t completely figured out how it works yet. I guess there’s some other functionality that’s going to be added as well, but I’m really clueless about the technical side of things, so I pretty much just leave it all to my brother to fix. But it’ll all get straightened out eventually.