Tag: japanese

We hiked a mountain together

Alas, it is time: Fuji-san.

(We saw this at the bus station on our way to the mountain from Tokyo.  Seemed like a good theme for the day.)

Fuji-san, by the time we were waiting for our bus to go home afterward, was a place I could hardly wait to leave.  Alex said to me that he could ‘hardly wait to get off this mountain,’ and I could only agree, and add a mental expletive to the thought.

Hiking/Climbing this mountain was simultaneously really cool and one of the worst things I’ve ever done.  When I am really, really frustrated, I curse.  And, for the most part, only then, do I curse.  Apparently, this includes not merely mental frustration but also physical frustration.  I cursed more in that night and morning of hiking than I likely ever have in an entire year.  That’s how frustrating the hike/climb was for me and for my body.  As I mentioned multiple times on the climb, ‘The worst part is that I know I can do it – I just don’t want to do it, and I almost don’t even care anymore… I just want to be done with it.”

We took it slowly, so as to be safe from altitude sickness.  It apparently is a really real thing, and my friend climbing with me was hit hard with it the last time he climbed Fuji-san.  My being from Houston only added to my own concern regarding the climb.  Houston is flat.  I’ve run a half marathon, regular ten-miles runs, and have done sports that include running almost all of my life.  Yet, even at my fittest, put me on a set of stairs at the start of my run, and I’ll be barely moving forward for the remainder of my run.  I can do long.  I just can’t do uphill.  (Though, as a side note, I have greatly improved in this area due to a huge hill by my apartment this past year, up which I regularly had to hike and bike.  I can only imagine how terrible Fuji-san would have been without this training alone.)

We began just as the rain was ending, shortly after 8pm.  The air was crisp and cool and required a jacket while standing still.  Once we began hiking, though, the jackets soon came off, and we embraced the beautiful, cool night.  And it truly was beautiful.  Down below us – for we began at the 5th station, which was already above some clouds – were various thunderstorms taking place.  The red lightning was beautiful to watch from above and from a distance.  It was like a living, moving painting, it seemed so unreal and so beautiful.  The moon was bright enough, we didn’t even need to use our headlamps (and so didn’t).

I had been practicing my Japanese listening skills by listening to the couple of Japanese guys walking behind us, so, when I realized that I didn’t know the word for lightning, I stopped them to find out.  I knew the word for thunder, but not lightning.  The guys were happy to pause and to chat briefly, and I think they enjoyed the small comedy that ensued with my question.  Apparently, they are the same word in Japanese, thunder and lightning.  So it took a bit of time to clear up that bit of confusion, my saying, ‘No, not kaminari, the other part.’  We also learned that the onomatopoeia for thunder is “gorogoro” in Japanese.  That was a fun conversation to have.  And it was representative of my mood at the time – things were wonderful and on an upward slope.

Unfortunately, at somewhere around 3200 meters, that mood had disappeared.

I was getting the really cool stamps that the different little huts and stations burn into people’s walking sticks, should they desire and pay a small fee (200-500 yen), and that was awesome.

But I was getting tired of the constant effort.  My calves were getting a bit sore, but everything else seemed okay-ish.  My back/shoulders began hurting somewhere around there, too, from carrying my backpack filled with water and cold-weather clothing.

 

By the time we were getting close to the top, – about an hour hike remaining – the path started getting crowded.  We had several points where we were actually kind of stuck behind a line of slow-moving people*, and we couldn’t go around.  As the sun was getting close to breaking the horizon, the end was in sight, but a lot of people blocked the way.  We were literally climbing over rocks to go the hard way on the path, so as to get around the slow-moving crowd.  One of the workers whose job was to keep people moving to the top helped me out as I crawled up a particularly large chunk of rock.  I didn’t need the help, because I had plenty of arm strength in me still, but it was sweet nonetheless.

At last, the path was just open enough, and I had the tori gate in front of me, declaring the top of the mountain.  I had about one minute, I could tell, before the sun would pop up, and so I rushed to find my small crew.  When I realized I would only find them after the sun came up, I rushed up a path into an open space, bolted for a two-rock formation that was like a chair, and sat myself down to watch the sunrise.

My timing couldn’t have been more perfect.  Within ten or 15 seconds, the sun popped up on the horizon.

 

It was totally cool and beautiful and all, and I cried.  And I was also a bit furious.  “Really?  I went through all of that just for this?  It’s a freakin’ sunrise.”  I can see those on almost any given day, seeing as it’s a daily occurrence and all.  But I still enjoyed this one.  I mean, come on – who, in normal life, really gets to brag about having watched a sunrise from the top of a mountain?  So that’s kind of cool.

Anyway…., now to talk about the good bits, instead of how much I disliked it all.

I proudly sported the warmest piece of clothing I still had with me in Japan.  I didn’t wear it the whole way, as it was my final and top layer in my clothing schedule.  However, once I put it on, I brightened a lot of people’s days (even before the sunrise).  A few workers gave me specific compliments on it, declaring it cute in English and Japanese.  On our descent, a small group asked to take photos with me.  (I had been tackling the last bit of the mountain with them, rushing to meet the sunrise, and it was almost a sort of team effort, even though we weren’t actually doing anything to help one another, aside from hurrying up and climbing around the slow people.)

My best friend has gone into public a handful of times in the leopard-print onesie I gave her, and I have always wanted to do the same.  This week, I was granted a fabulous opportunity for doing do, and I embraced it fully, I think.  😛

 

Hiking the mountain as we did, beginning at night and hiking to sunrise, is not the recommended route.  We did not pay more money than we had to attempt rest on an uncomfortable floor in tight quarters with stinky people, only to get up a few hours later to start hiking some more.  Most people follow the suggestion of doing so, though, or else hike the full thing during the day (too hot, so no, thank you).  This means that the night hikers are, for the most part, on their own.

This is not to say that we were the only actual people around.  Merely that we had our own space and pace, and only crossed others briefly from time to time.  The higher we got, the more people we crossed.  But it was generally calm and quiet for more than the first half of our hike.

The other people who were hiking, became almost like friends.  At each station, as we would pause, we would get to chat with others who were hiking.  Those with similar paces were often at rest spots around the same time as we were, and so we had these small chats multiple times.  And the chatting, really, wasn’t too much of chatting.  At first, it was, when we would interact with someone for the first time or so.  After that, though, it was more like just hanging out together.  We would talk or not, but we had an understood conversation of something along the lines of, “Man, oh, man… this mountain…” to varying degrees of stress, fatigue, and thoughts of, ‘Are we all just a bit crazy?’  It was really, really cool, and I thoroughly enjoyed the relationships that occurred throughout the night.

I mentioned Alex before.  Alex is a Canadian from Ottawa whom we met shortly before beginning our hike.  My friend Casey and I were hanging out at the 5th station, waiting for 8pm to arrive and the rains to be finished, and I noticed a guy who seemed to be solo, and who also seemed to be an English-speaker (based on the fact that he clearly understood our conversation).  I started conversation with him, discovered that he was, in fact, solo for the hike, and that he was planning to leave at the same time we were.  It became understood that he could hike with us, if he desired.  And so, he did.  Alex was wonderful company, and was an invaluable helper on the way down from the mountain.  When the announcement that ‘the typhoon is coming sooner than expected, so get off the mountain asap’ occurred, I had not yet rested enough atop the mountain.  My strength was somewhat nonexistent, simply due to a lack of sleep and food and rest (plus the altitude, but the sleep and food were the main parts).  Alex took my backpack for me, and carried it the majority of the way down the mountain (maybe around 2/3 of it) for me.  He was an absolute star.  For that and for more, I am incredibly grateful that we found him and got to hike/climb with him.

At one point, Casey and I had a bit of a mini-adventure of our own.  One of the troubles of hiking/climbing in the dark is that things are sometimes difficult to see.  (Uh, duh…)  Well, on the mountain, there are parts of the path that aren’t obvious based on the ground, and so little ropeway things are set up to guide climbers the correct route.  The mountain workers near the top actually would yell at people for going outside of these ropes.  So they’re for guidance, but a huge part of that guidance is safety for the climbers.

Well, we had an adventure with one of these ropes.  Casey and I are walking the path, and up ahead of us, we see a rope appearing.  We turn and look uphill, and see that there seems to be another rope up a ways over to the right.  So, the path curves to the right here.  We begin the ascent toward the second set of ropes, I in front and Casey following, and quickly discover that the footing is terrible.  I express my concern to Casey, and that I can’t seem to get myself up the path (this was a climbing area, not a walking one).  He gives me some support and a good push, thinking it must only be one small patch of hard-to-handle earth.  Within a few seconds, I tell him that I cannot go up, and, unintentionally, then slide back down a few feet on the slippery earth that I cannot seem to grip in any way.

There are people behind us as we are doing this, waiting for us to get a move on.  We both have the same thought, though: This can’t be done.  And, as a follow-up, If this is truly the path, then our ascent of this mountain must end here, because we can’t make it up this path.  We looked up again, and saw people walking alongside the other roping up and to the right of us.  None of them seemed to have just gone through any sort of tremendous struggle as we were currently facing.  Our hearts were sinking – were we just that bad at climbing, that unprepared?

And then Casey saw it.  If this had been daylight, we’d have had no issue.  Casey took a second to turn around, and happened to look way to the left (now his right, since he was turned around).  Another rope!  In true Japanese fashion, the ‘signage’ was dreadful.  Yes, the path turned to the right there, but we needed to be on the left side of the rope, not the right.  And yes, the rope I’d seen up ahead was where we were supposed to go, but we needed to take a path about four meters to our left in order to get there.

Casey then helped me up (or, rather, down) from my sprawled-out position on the impossible patch, and we both regathered our confidence.  As we laughed heartily, – though not too loudly, due to the fact that our lungs couldn’t handle too much with such altitude – we discussed our mutual thoughts from that dreadful and fear-filled 30-ish seconds we had just experienced.  Casey said that he would contact me in twenty years, and ask if I remembered that time we utterly failed on Fuji-san, and almost had to give up the whole climb, because we tried to climb a dangerous, non-path.

At the top, I mailed two post cards – one to my mother and one to my post card pal in Ottawa (crazy coincidence, right?) – and then used the bathroom, and went and sat on the rim of the volcano that is Fuji-san.  (Some other things happened before all of this, but I don’t much care to share about any of it right now.)  I’m not entirely sure I was supposed to do that, but I didn’t care.  I was tired and needed to sit down and eat something.  Japanese food generally just makes me sick, so I figured it wouldn’t be good to have Japanese food with Casey and Alex when they ate at the little restaurant-esque place after sunrise.

So, I hung my legs over the edge of the crater, as I called it, and munched.  The ice on the inside was really cool to see, as well as how the clouds just kind of appeared from the crater itself as the wind blew.  One of my favorite parts of the whole adventure was looking down upon the clouds, as though there were something on the ground (or perhaps their own sort of ground).  Occasionally, we were inside the clouds, and that was cool, too.  But it was just amazing, being able to look down and see clouds below, but be sitting in the wide and open air (as opposed to being in an airplane).

The wind was petrifying elsewhere, but in that particular spot, I felt little of it.  As I did my time lapse of the sunrise, I felt like my phone might be ripped out of my hands.  And, as I walked to the post office, I felt like I, myself, would be thrown from the mountain top, so strong was the wind and so little coverage and places to hold on were there at times.  I’ve never been more scared in my life than I was dealing with that wind at times.

However, in my cozy spot, the wind was slight enough that I don’t even remember thinking anything about it.  I took a photo with my cool hiking stick, which now had all of its stamps (well, all the ones it was going to get – I hadn’t known that certain stations even had stamps at the beginning, so I didn’t have any of the really low stamps, aside from the 5th station, which was where I bought the stick), because I figured it to be the best place for such a photo.

And I just enjoyed myself for a bit.

Too soon, I got notification from Casey that we had to rush down to avoid the typhoon, and so got up wearily, and began heading back to the trails.  I had intended to take some really cool photos up top, and even brought my Japanese flag that was given to me the other week at our leavers’ party.  However, I truly just didn’t care enough at that point to bother.  I had given up on the photos before I’d even headed off to the post office.  I was just kind of done.

So, we headed down the miserable descent, throughout which we were covered with red and black dirt that felt like it was attacking us in the strong winds.

We needed bathrooms, and only two sets were to be found on the entire descent, both too near the bottom to have left us in good moods for most of the descent.  We needed water, which was abundantly on sale on the way up the mountain, but which was nowhere to be found on the descent.  Finally, we made it back to the 5th station, and not one of us was in a very good mood.  Casey changed his clothes and wiped himself down, and then we all had lunch as we waited for the bus Casey had just booked for us.

After lunch, I got my photo with my Japanese flag.  Before we began our hike, as we were hanging out at the 5th station and had just met Alex, someone asked him to borrow his hiking stick.  He’d purchased one of the tall ones that had a small Japanese flag and a bell on top of it, and some foreigners wanted to have it in their photo with the Fuji sign.  I then pulled out my actual flag and offered it to them.  They were overjoyed.  About 15 minutes, what seemed like a hundred photos, and many families later, my flag was returned to me by the original delighted family.

It was in this same spot that I got my own photo, but with a different date on the sign.  I was proud of my accomplishment.  And, though I almost couldn’t have cared less about photos for showing others at the time, I had enough sense in me to know that I would want the photo later on, when I wasn’t beyond ready to get off the mountain.  And I was correct.

I was correct, too, in my guess while hiking that, though I was struggling through and hating the hike at the time, I could only imagine that I probably would feel as though it had really been not too big of a deal, and , yeah, of course I could do it again.  I look back now, and I kind of wonder what was so difficult, why I so disliked it and was so miserable.  I fully recall, however, that, in the moment, I was truly miserable and almost didn’t care about the hike, and that I never wanted to do anything like it again.

Nonetheless, I am glad that I hiked Fuji-san.  It was a wonderful experience, and an amazing accomplishment, especially since it was such a mental struggle for me.  It was a good mental and physical exercise for me (even though it has left my toes on my left foot tingly and numb the past 30-ish hours), and I am grateful for the experience and the opportunity.  And, if anyone, including myself, ever wants to do something like hike Fuji-san, I suggest, as I mentioned to Casey, doing something like hiking Tsukuba-san three days in a row as as test for preparation.  If you can do that, then you can handle Fuji-san decently.  If you don’t do that, then you’re all too likely to hate life for about 16 hours.

 

Post-a-day 2017

 

P.S.  Oh, and the rocks and dirt were absolutely beautiful up top!

 

​

*Is that actually slowly-moving?

 

Later, dude!

I said my goodbye’s to four different friends today.  Who knew I ever would have even that many friends here?  And they are only a small handful of the friends I have made in Japan.  In a way, it only makes sense.  However, culturally, it was very much unexpected.  I have a bunch of Japanese friends, and I don’t even go out drinking.  How cool is that?  (Fun Fact: A lot of these friends think I just don’t drink alcohol at all, I drink it so rarely.)

Anyway…,as I mentioned to one friend tonight, it didn’t feel like, “Goodbye.”  It felt like, “またね！” or, “じゃあね！” (both of which are versions of, “See you later!”).  Hopefully, that is, indeed, the case.  I really like these people, and I have a feeling that they like me, too.  🙂

Post-a-day 2017

Asia?  Really?  Really

Who would have thought that I would spend a year of my life living in Asia?  I never even had any real desire to go to Asia, until I met my circus acrobat friends, who are from China.  But the desire that developed out of those friendships was merely a cultural trade among friends – I had shared it of my home with them, and now they wanted to give the same to me.  In essence, I want to go to China to be with my friends, not because I am specifically aiming to see China.  Nothing against China, of course – I just have never had a real desire to see it.

On that note, – let’s roll with the thoughts here – I feel as though I have a rather ability to distinguish between my real desires and my that-would-be-cool desires.  I explain.  When I have what I am currently calling a “real desire”, it is something that I intend to pursue.  With general desires, they are things that would be nice to pursue, but I have no deeper intentions to pursue them.  These are, of course, both to varying degrees.

Being a multi-millionaire would be amazing.  I desire it.  I truly do.  However, it is not something I intend to pursue, as much as I may wish to attain it.  It is a general desire for me.  Returning to German-speaking Europe for Christmas markets is a “real desire”, as I am calling them (Can you tell that I don’t much like my current terminology?).  No, I will not do it this year, most likely, and probably not next year either.  However, it is in my thoughts, and I intend to do it at some point.

This is where the varying degrees comes in for distinguishing.  This is one of my middle-range real desires.  Yes, I want to do it, and yes, I believe I will do it.  No, I am not in a hurry to do it.  Having a frozen margarita in Texas is more of an immediate real desire.  I will not wait for this one to come up somewhat conveniently, and then take action, or casually plan for it in my some time soon future.  My mother is picking me up at the airport when I arrive home to Houston, and she has known for months that I want to go have margaritas the day I arrive.  We are getting margaritas within hours of my arrival to Texas, and are only taking that long, because I want it fresh, customs and immigration and baggage take time, and the airport is a ways away from good margaritas.  Essentially, I am pursuing this desire as soon as it is possible for it to be fulfilled.

One other example, just for clarity (or to confuse you more, if this all doesn’t make sense to you), could be in my desire to bungee jump off a bridge that is over water.  Something a long time ago gave me the desire, but it was more of an unreal desire for me.  I didn’t expect my life to have it ever be an option.  However, once I went small-scale bungee jumping with friends, it began to shift to a real desire.  I was afraid to pursue it, so I left it in the gray area, ready to be pursued, should the opportunity arise.  Now that I have lived somewhere that offers such a thing, – Ibaraki, Japan – I see myself pursuing it.  I notice that it is not huge in my list of desires, but it is a real one.  The opportunity presented itself two weeks ago, and I made arrangements to go jump.  Of course, timing was such that I got dreadfully sick the day beforehand, and so rescheduled with my friend.  I am now scheduled to go with a different friend next week.  If it doesn’t work out, I’ll be okay.  This is a real desire that I have, but it is so much on a non-time limit that I am okay not doing it now – I know I will get around to it at some point, so I don’t have to hassle myself extremely to make it work at this one place.  That being said, I really do want to handle it all now, and bungee off my bridge in Japan, partly because it’s one less thing for me to think about in the future, and partly because it makes for a fun story.  And I used the word “handle,” not because I dislike the situation, but because a lot of things here recently have kind of been a real hassle for me, and so I tend to think more in terms of ‘managing’ things in life for the next two weeks, as opposed to just ‘living’ life and ‘creating’ things, and all that jazz.
Anyway, that was a fun tangent for me.  I could have explained it loads better, but I didn’t.  I hope that’s okay for now.  I’m sitting on a train to go up to my final festival in Japan, and I really need to pee, but don’t want to bother using what might be a gross train toilet (notice that I have no concern for leaving my belongings at my seat – score one big one for Japan on this point), when I know I can make it all the way to the station.  So, I have written this to help me pass the time without wandering thoughts on the discomfort of a filling bladder (the realness of the discomfort can be evidenced by the fact that my shorts haven’t been buttoned for close to an hour already).  I dislike writing on my phone, and for more than one reason (physical slowness of thumb typing and high error rate are two of the main ones).  Therefore, I’ll end with this:

I never expected to end up living in Asia, for any period of time.  I especially did not expect it to be for longer than I had lived in any country other than my own.  I like Europe.  I would have expected my doing a year there long before I even visited Asia.  But here I am, one year through (and very through, I do believe) life in Asia.  It has turned out that Japan is not a very good place for me to live my life, but that I really do appreciate Asia.  I actually have real desire to return to Asia, and to experience more of it.  Japan, Korea, and Singapore have only gotten me started, it seems.

In a way, it is stressful, because there are now even more places I want to visit.  However, I will just roll with what life offers to me, and aim for returning for at least one visit for a start, hopefully within the next few years.  I’d say that this is a middle-range real desire, similar to, and likely above the Christmas Market one.  It’ll happen, I believe, as I have full intentions for it to happen.  It’s a real desire I have.  Life does what it does, though, so we’ll just have to see.  For now, I’m at the end of the train line in the next minute or three, so I’ll go wrangle my baggage – giving away loads of nut butters, smoothie boosters, and spices, as well as my Magic Bullet (c) (Is that right?) – and head for my friend who is meeting me at the station.  Then I’ll use a bathroom either there or at her nearby home.  And then we’ll enjoy fireworks and a festival, possibly in the rain.  Whatever the case, we will enjoy it, which is a main part of what called to mind my thoughts on having lived here in the first place.

Post-a-day 2017

Hospitality Notes

I found one of the best notes ever, when I woke up the other morning at my friend’s house.

It was on the counter of the bathroom (technically, the room with the toilet).  It read:

Hannah 1/3

Good Morning!
I have few things to tell you.

  • Please make yourself at home ! ! !  Do not stress your self to worry things.

    2/3

  • Use anything in the house.  Do not buy things you do not bring to U.S.
  • Stay as long as you want.  even after I left for U.S.  I trust you.

    3/3

  • Let S—— out from my bed room after you get up in the morning.  So she can stay at the living room. (for food and water)

I was just delighted when I reached the end of the notes.  They were incredibly southern hospitality and totally Japanese at the same time.  The hearty welcome to make myself at home, combined with the fact that the sticky note pages were labeled with page __ of __.  I loved it (and still do).  I love good friends.

Post-a-day 2017

Sing-a-longs for school?

Yesterday, I brought my ukulele to class.  It was my final day of teaching, and I only had one class.  Seeing as it was with the students who are in the music course program at the school (think of it as being like a college major, but in high school), and they were the only class of the day for me, the teacher asked me to do something relating to music, if I could.

For the longest while, I had nothing. I was just too exhausted and mentally worn out even to think about ideas, let alone come up with some (let alone good ones).  But, as I found myself fiddling at long last with my ukulele on Wednesday night, – this was after having decided just to do a non-music-related activity – I wondered if I couldn’t pull off just singing songs the whole class period.

Sure enough, my brain decided to work for me as I played some songs for myself.  Kids could sit where they wanted, and look up lyrics on their phones (Yay! for phones in class.).  We could start with the ABCs, since some of us had specifically discussed in that class a few weeks ago that Japan seems to have learned only the first half of the alphabet song, and then made up the rest, making the whole thing weird, and having everyone always mumble out somewhere along the second half.  From there, we could “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”, and then move to some real songs.

I was nervous about my uke playing, and the fact that I’m really just a beginner on the instrument, having come as a lazy-esque mid-level guitar player, and simply become a lazy-esque ukulele player.  However, I practiced several songs, and the chords really came back to me rather well, and I even learned some new ones quite easily as I went along.

Once in class, I offered for a student to play the uke.  Two kids in the front happily took over tuning it for me (I have a decent ear, but I knew theirs would be better.) when I asked, and one even pre-guessed the notes, singing them aloud for tuning (think of perfect pitch folks).  So, I thought they might have had experience with ukuleles.  This is Japan, after all.  However, the only kid who said he possibly could play a little – usually Japanese for ‘I’m rather decent, but just don’t play too often these days,’ – tried out the uke, and discovered that the chords were different from any instrument he knew.  This means that he strummed some odd-sounding chords, and then I reclaimed my ukulele with a bit more confidence and determination.

I taught them the alphabet song, and we had a wonderful time of it all, moving from that to the stars to “Under the Sea” to “Let it go”, and finally “The Lazy Song”.  There might have been another in there, but I’m not recalling it right now.

All-in-all, the kids had a blast and didn’t seem to stop smiling, I had a blast, and the teacher was utterly pleased with the lesson and class (she even kept saying so over and over again afterward).  I wish I had been able to do more things like that before, but the schedule never really allowed for it.  So it goes – it made for a wonderful final class, though, a magical send-off for me.  And that is beautiful.

Post-a-day 2017

Glitter bouquet

Today, I was given a bouquet of flowers as part of my goodbye celebration thing at my base school. The roses in the bouquet had/have print glitter all over their tops.  I have seen fake roses with their petal tips dipped in glue and then glitter, but I think today was the first time I’ve ever seen real roses that had undergone this procedure.  I instantly thought of my best friend, who loves glitter.  And then her husband, who doesn’t.  As part of their pre-wedding celebrations, I did an interview thing with each of them.  One of the questions was asking about something that the other loves, but you really don’t.  Her then-fiancé answered with a powerful, “Glitter.  It gets everywhere.”

On the bus, heading home shortly after the ceremony thing, as I carried the bouquet in a cardboard box filled with whatever I needed to take home from my desk, I discovered pink glitter on my shirt, pants, and even ukulele, which I was carrying on my arm.

Just now, getting ready to sleep, my attention was caught by a pink sparkle… on my bed.  Why must there be glitter on my bed?

Oh, glitter.  Oh, glitter.  😛


Post-a-day 2017

City Surprises

Making my way through the nonsense that is the Shibuya Crossing on a holiday afternoon, I am feeling almost desperate to be on a train home.  There are just so many people in my way, with no respect for my desire to be not here. Not that I actually expect them to know I want not to be here – I am merely noting their ignorance to the matter.  I am almost to the station, when a small but clear opening appears right ahead of me in the shuffling crowd.

I hardly have to think – in fact, I think I know what it is without thinking – to recognize the colorful lettering on the page of that folded-open notebook being held just above people’s heads.

FREE HUGS

I hesitate a moment, verifying that the holder of the sign is respectable/huggable.  Despite my being in Japan, I accept that this young Japanese guy is holding the sign, and trust that he knows what it means.  Perhaps especially because I am in Japan, actually.  

He’s young and Japanese, and he looks trustworthy.  I throw open my arms, and instantly see his face light up, as he says an adorable “Sahn kyuu!” (How the average Japanese pronunciation goes for ‘Thank you.’)  We embrace, and it is solid and long and wonderfully perfect.  I return the verbal thanks, with emphasis on thanking him for the hug (as opposed to his thanking my willingness or whatever on my end), give a gloriously contended smile, and go on my merry way the last few yards to the station.

I savor the experience, and especially the loving hug, as I wander goofily through the crowds up to the tracks.  Thank you, God.  You gave me just what I needed in order to feel I was heading the right way just now.  I am in the right place right now, and it is perfect.  Thank you.

Post-a-day 2017

Copycat, copy the cat

A friend is helping me prepare for my goodbye speeches at my schools. I wanted to do them in Japanese, and I wanted them to be good.  Yes, I could rumble my way through some Japanese and be mostly understood without much prep.  However, I want the speeches to be better than that, seeing as they will be each given during a whole ceremony thing at each school.  Not the time I want to be casual with my words.  Also, almost no one would understand the English anyway, if I gave the speeches in English.

All of that, however, is merely the precursor to this next bit…

This friend who is helping me, she’s helping me by recording herself giving the speech.  Why?  Because I want to hear a native speaker give the speech.  As we were discussing this, I mentioned that I do better copycatting someone’s speaking when I have never heard a certain word or phrase already spoken.  (If I have heard it already, then I usually have already learned the appropriate natural way of saying it, and can produce it on my own, without aural prompting or guidance.)

When I mentioned this to my friend, her reply caught me off guard.

copying is the basic way for learning 👍🏻

What?

And yes, it is so utterly and beautifully true.  As babies, we copy our parents and family members in order to learn to talk and walk and eat and do basically everything that we do successfully.  The same applies as we learn new behaviors theighout our whole lives, and it definitely includes learning to speak a new(foreign) language properly.

And yet, schools have this huge concept of ‘copying is cheating, and cheating is bad, so copying is bad.’

I once found myself in a meeting with fellow faculty who were arguing/fussing about preventing cheating in the school, while I was wondering what the whole big deal with cheating was on the first place. It’s not that I was (or currently am) approving of cheating – I was (and still am) simply wondering what the reasoning was behind this terror-inducing aversion to cheating.  It just kind of felt like a sort of blind belief situation, with no real background to support it validly.  It may very well be completely valid – I have just never sat down a brainstormed enough to find out if it is or isn’t.  And I was wondering in that meeting if anyone else had done that.  (Though I found it highly unlikely, so I didn’t bother asking – it would have just stirred up trouble.)

And here, tonight, my friend says that copying is like the basis for learning.  And with only a brief bit of thought, this idea, this concept, seems to make sense, and much more than the ‘no cheating’ one ever has.  

After a bit of discussion in this new topic with my friend, I discovered that the word in Japanese for “to learn” comes from the word for “to copy”.  I was in momentary disbelief, and then complete unsurprise – of course Japanese has that.  I can so see that, it makes such easy sense with the Japanese culture.

It turns out that the old word for “to copy” is 真似ぶ(manebu) (and the current is 真似る(maneru)).  The word for “to learn” is  学ぶ(manabu).

Put more visually simple:

学ぶ(manabu/ to learn)
真似ぶ(manebu/ to copy)
真似る(maneru/ to copy) (old word)

(And manebu is the old word for maneru, but the have the same meaning.)
Wow.  Just wow.

I certainly plan to ponder this topic much, much more.  This concludes my thoughts so far, however.

Post-a-day 2017

While everything is perfect

In this book I’m currently reading – okay, it’s an audiobook, and I’m listening to it, but you get the point – was a comment by the narrating character that rather struck me the other day.  She was talking about some date she’d had (or something like a date, anyway), and, though it seemed there was potential for another activity of some sort next, she had decided to leave.  She said, “I wanted to leave while everything was perfect.”

At first, I felt as though she was simply setting herself up for missing out by not going and for delusion by thinking that dates (or more of whatever it was) needed to be always perfect.  And then I considered my immediate responses, and discovered that I disagreed with both of them.

When I really began to consider her comment, it gave way to what felt like brilliance.  Yesterday, I was at a goodbye beach party.  There had been an option to rsvp for an overnight stay after the official party, and I had initially declined this option.  I wanted to sleep in my own bed, and several other factors helped me pick that easily.  However, once at the party, I found that I didn’t want to leave so soon.  I began exploring the logistics of staying the night, and found that there was possibility of enough space for my joining the party.

As I recalled my book’s character’s words, however, I began to think in a different manner.  Yes, I am loving spending time with everyone right now.  If I left now, I would be leaving while everything is perfect.  If I stay the night, what will happen?  And I instantly saw the probable, almost certain future of the situation.  I would stay, thinking I’d have enough energy to manage the night, and then eventually would hit a wall, want to sleep, not be able to get to sleep because of the partying people, get annoyed at the overly drunk partiers, and have a miserable end to the party.  Whom was I kidding here?  I would rather leave while everything is perfect, than stay until I’m furiously agitated and starting to hate the people I was currently loving.

And so I left a short while later, had a wonderful time riding home-ish (same train, different stops) with the group of girls who were leaving at that time, chatting and joking and having an overall wonderful time together (as I already mentioned).

And the party as a whole ended perfectly for me.  It was just plain cool to have had the party go so well.
Tonight, after another beach day with a different friend, we had planned to go to this awesome salsa party, with this Grammy-winning DJ and various salsa performances and live music for social dancing – it’s a big deal party celebrating the anniversary of some club, essentially.  And it was only like 20 bucks to attend, which is way cheap for such a thing here in Tokyo.

When we arrived back to my friend’s place, and I had showered from the beach, I began to consider that line again.  Could I “leave” while everything is perfect?  Could I just go to bed now and not go, and be happy with that?  The answer was a resounding “Yes.”  I had been exhausted all day already, and am far behind on sleep for this past week – I want sleep.  I love dancing, and I love cool opportunities like this, especially to attend with friends.  And the risk was incredibly high that I would grow to exhausted, smoking would be too intense for me in the club, music would be too loud for my already existent headache, and I would be crying (possibly literally) to go home and drink a bunch of cool water and just go to sleep.

So, I stayed home, and it was perfect.  Now, I am off to some much-needed and much-wanted sleep.  Goodnight, World.  I’ll see you when my head feels great again in the late AM.

Long story-ish short: I think it is a very valuable phrase, “I wanted to leave while everything was perfect.”

Post-a-day 2017