Jetsetting

The JET program has become such a big deal to my friends that I can’t ignore it anymore. JET means spending one or two years in Japan. JET means making 3.6 million yen a year. JET means my housemate crying over a late transcript and my best friend from Tokyo losing trust in the professor she asked to write her recommendation. So it’s been pretty rough lately, with all the incomplete applications and upset friends, but I still think JET is a great program. If I had the time and the desire to live in Japan again (which I pretty much don’t anymore) JET would be a really good opportunity for me. Of course, you can’t decide where they place you, but that’s a risk you have to take. 

My friend Lauren brought up a good point today. How does JET know what qualifies you to be a good teacher? Simply being a native English speaker doesn’t mean you have the skills to help a nihonjin learn the language. It’s pretty easy to pick up a job teaching English as an American in Tokyo. I didn’t get the chance to do it myself, but I’ve heard if you approach it online, it’s much like couchsurfing or social networking in that you make a profile, and let clients find you from there. You’re supposed to get a work permit to be able to make money teaching English, but it seems fairly easy to go without. As a potentially lucrative career, it would seem that tutoring English is a great side-job and even up for consideration as a full-time job. I was once at an izakaya with a guy that claimed to work for a company that was superior to JET, and on its way to taking over the English-teaching market. Sadly, I don’t remember the name of said company or the name of the guy I talked to, but that company was probably a good option for someone wanting to work in Tokyo. 

Anyway, as of now I don’t know enough about JET to be eager to apply. That and the application deadline passed last week. But what kind of students do you teach? How much of the lesson plans are you responsible for coming up with yourself? I’ve heard good things from friends currently participating in JET, and JET alumni, but it seems to be one of those things you have to do to see what it’s all about. It could definitely be an adventure, if you were placed in some tiny fishing village or something. I used to think I wanted to do JET, until my mom pointed out that even if I did take a year off after graduation, I wouldn’t be able to do any interviews while applying for graduate school. Or it would be crazy expensive to fly out and back. And just thinking of going to Japan now, after spending Thanksgiving break reuniting with friends from Jochi and Tokyo, I feel like Tokyo is a chapter in my life that is over. I’m incredibly glad it happened and would love to go back, but can’t see myself living there. So ganbatte to everyone applying for JET this cycle, and tell me all about it when you get back. 

(((＠°▽°＠)八(＠°▽°＠)))

( ^_^)/ Konnichiwa sekai!

Tokyo is quite possibly the greatest city on earth, yet I could never live there. I’m not sure I could survive the temptation of endless Kapibara-san and Hello Kitty merchandise, nomiho, and pretty boys that dress better than me. Not to mention the crowds, chikans, and the horrible exchange rate. But despite being incompatible with my lifestyle, Tokyo is an amazing place to go to and observe a unique culture that seems so alien but also shares some universal traits with your culture and mine. As a semester abroad returnee fresh from a four-month stay in Tokyo, I’m here to share my gaijin perspective on anything Tokyo-centric.

In my time abroad, I lived with a host family, made nihonjin friends, and studied alongside English speaking Japanese students at Jochi daigaku. Getting to meet these new tomodachis and hearing about their dreams and opinions has given me a better picture of the Japanese psyche. What motivates people, how they feel about the world and its issues, why otaku culture is taking over the world, or even what the big deal is with blood type and why it matters: these are all of interest when looking at Japanese mass culture and and the ideas behind it. From the perspective of an outsider, this blog aims to find the similarities and differences between American and Japanese culture, and the ways the two have influenced and molded each other.

As an eager consumer of American pop culture and a short-term participant in the Tokyo scene, I have some thoughts on cross-cultural comparison and exchange. My Tokyo experience was *cliché alert* life changing and eye opening, and holds a dear place in my heart. It's a bummer that Tokyo is more part of my past than my future, but because the experience is receding farther in my rearview mirror, I want to reflect on my adventure now, and form and record my thoughts while they’re still fresh. Potential posting topics may include: tokYOLO and other gaijin mistakes; all-night karaoke and last train culture; changing family forms and why my dad takes a bath before me; emoticons and why is everything kawaii; earthquakes, train suicides, poorly planned Mt. Fuji trips and other things to watch out for; hotter than hot summers and how do people deal; face masks and other train etiquette; salaryman-centric culture and what this means for everyone else; matching cell phone charms and where do I find a boyfriend; etc.

In a more general sense, I might look more deeply into the concept of travel and adventure. Why do we travel? How far are tourists willing to go outside of their comfort zone? When you move to a new place, at what point can you call yourself a local rather than the new guy? As someone who feels pretty deeply rooted to my hometown, I am maybe even more so curious about what gets us out and about in the world, and why I have this urge to explore. And for those of us who are more the Garden State “feel homesick for a place that doesn’t even exist” type, here’s to finding that place and making it your own.

“And if you feel just like a tourist in the city you were born
Then it’s time to go
And define your destination
There’s so many different places to call home”

- Death Cab for Cutie 
You Are a Tourist

Dedicated to heinous stories

Heinous stories, a tumblog dedicated to the study abroad experience of one American college girl, is actually operated by a friend of mine. Who better to relate my blog to than someone who shared an experience with me? Paku (nickname I just made up), an Oregon native who similarly studied Japanese for a few years before making the trip to Tokyo, is fellow adventure-seeking globetrotter who spent her previous semester abroad in Chile. As a Tokyo newcomer and undergraduate student she is fairly inexperienced in the world she has immersed herself in, but she’s a quick learner and has some compelling insights on the bunka, or culture of urban Tokyo.

Now that the abroad experience is over, Paku has pretty much stopped posting. However, during the semester her goal was to post every day, though she failed pretty miserably at that. It ended up being more like once every two weeks, though the posts would cover the timespan since the last.

Paku’s blog is fairly obscure. Paku did post a link to her blog via her facebook, which was how I found it, but she wasn’t very actively promoting it or trying to get tumblr followers or anything desperate like some other friends I have. Her shared link got ten likes and four comments, which gives us an idea of the blog’s audience; the comments were all from friends who had been a part of the same study abroad program and were mentioned in posts on the site. Basically, it’s a pretty personal and intimate collection of posts, more like a diary that she’s letting her friends see.

Each post is a list of whatever happened in the time since the previous post, so it’s difficult to choose a real stand-out, but her final entry, post-Japan and entitled ヽ(´▽｀)ノ (I didn’t know you could name a post with an emoticon) was a comprehensive look at the whole experience. All of her posts showcase her great deadpan humor, and her seamless blending of Japanese and English slang. There may be a word for that, like the opposite of Engrish I guess. Here are some standouts:

**i’ll miss you…… 

7…….tabehoudais (mochiron) 

7.6 actually wait. i take back the tabehoudais. that shit made me morbidly obese. 

17. ……cute passive aggressive japanese people 

***i won’t miss...... 

……heels. i’ll wear them, but not erryday you crays. 

 “The blog post that i half-assed my way through just to show that i’m still posting,” was pretty entertaining, especially since I know Rachel (girl from the first nine items on the list) but also because I can relate to falling asleep on the train and ending up at the airport and having a getting obese off of onigiri. Paku has some interesting and strange ideas and I’m glad she shares them here.

Heinous stories is pretty related to Purikura puroland in that we’re both basing our posts on this experience of being abroad for half a year. Because we were in the same program, we went to the same school, same field trips, shared some of the same friends, etc. Though her blog is organized in a list form, and posts don’t really have any particular theme, we’re both dealing with being confronted with a culture that is very different from our own, and slowly (or arguably rapidly) falling in love with it. Her blog is far from scholarly (aside from the fact that she is a student), filled with inane, tangential observations and inappropriate language, but she still manages to capture detail in her posts.

Most of Paku’s followers, who are friends and other members of our study abroad group, are relevant to the field in that, like us, they could be authors of similar blogs. In fact, CIEE (the study abroad program we were in) gives a small stipend to students who write for the official Tokyo blog.  Some are East Asian Studies majors, or interested in pursuing careers and lives abroad in Japan. We are the soon-to-be college graduates deciding whether or not we want to pursue Japanese studies, and so are pretty relevant.

This blog is a great source of inspiration to me, I wish I could be as effortlessly funny and charismatic. Until I find that voice, I will continue to look to Heinous stories, even though it will have to be all old posts since she’s pretty much over updating. My site will be different in organization, because I want to base posts on some sort of main topic or idea and go from there. In doing so I’d like to dig a little deeper at some larger issues that bother or occupy my mind. I want to work on making my blog more personal, which I’ve had the opportunity to do with open posts, but will continue to make an effort on. In any case, hope to adopt some of Paku’s spirit into Purikura puroland and make it more clever and cute for everyone.

The obvious gaijin      

Uiggu, a self-described “blonde Japanese-speaking girl living in Tokyo with [her] Japanese man” who also sometimes does things dressed as a maid for money (“NOT THOSE THINGS” she points out), runs a blog focused on food, unnecessary cute items and daily life. Mostly she blogs about her life, in which food and cute things are sometimes involved, looking at Tokyo from a Western perspective.
      
In Et tu Tabelog, we are introduced to the post with the following:  

Oops, it’s been over a month since I last updated. It’s also been about that long since I went to the gym. I shall blame my quite insane schedule and my ?? 4 hour commute every day.

Uiggu’s casual style and smooth incorporation of katakana give a sense of familiarity as well as authenticity on her part as a newly initiated Tokyo native. Telling us about the past month, she gives us the rundown in list form of what happened, assumedly in order of importance.

Right at the top of her list is “The Worst Izakaya EVER That Actually Ruined a Perfectly Good Saturday Night By Its Crapness.” Giving the bar what she deems is a more appropriate title, full of her own flavorful language, is humorous and revealing or her personality. She’s witty, and unafraid to speak up if she’s unhappy. Uiggu then proceeds with a description of how to get to said bar:

All you need to remember is the…fact that it’s on the 8th floor of that narrow building with a weird brightly-lit comics/anime shop on the ground floor and a tiny elevator which is past that expensive bar with the blue colour scheme, under the bridge and to your left if you come out of the Hachiko exit of Shibuya station and turn right.

The descriptive language lets us know that Uiggu is observant and familiar with Shibuya, as well as giving us her feel for this particular part of it—it’s a unflatteringly-lit difficult-to-get-to place that basically sucks. Continuing down her list, number two continues in the same vein. It details her attempt to write a “Scathing Review” (her term, reused multiple times) and explains why it is such a big deal that she bothered to write it in the first place.

We can get a good sense of her emotional state when she describes herself as “INCENSED.” Yes that is a combination of bold type, caps lock, and quotation marks. You can definitely feel the emphasis there. Uiggu also uses hyperbole pretty often:

THAT’S HOW SHITTY THIS PLACE WAS. I am not even exaggerating (and some might say I do that a lot too).

With the help of parentheses, Uiggu is poking fun at herself while once again emphasizing how angry she is.

As for linking strategies, Uiggu employs the basic hyperlinking to the bar’s site and review site that she hates with such a passion, Tabelog. She actually links to Tabelog each time she mentions it, which, knowing that she has vowed never to use it again, may seem counterintuitive but she is proving a point by linking to Tabelog each time. I get it, Tabelog sucks and I will resist the temptation to click the link each time. 

Uiggu’s voice is consistent across posts, though her emotional state varies. In Et tu Tabelog, she displayed anger, but in other posts she shows excitement and happiness, such as in Hand-made Valentines –OR ELSE. This post is about the Japanese approach to Valentine’s day, and how she too has been sucked into the chocolate-making, PSP-exchanging craziness.

In terms of content, Uiggu blogs about pretty much whatever she comes across. This includes topics she’s stumbled upon on Reddit, her everyday bento making, and strangers she runs into at train stations. These topic choices give us a sense of her personality through what she’s chosen to write about, and what dominates even her non-topic-oriented posts. We get to know what she’s interested in and passionate about, along with her pet peeves and what makes her angry.

Overall, Uiggu’s voice definitely complements the subject matter of the blog. Basically, the blog is about her life so it follows that her voice is going to shine through it. Her voice is definitely what makes the blog fun and popular; any blog involving a cross-cultural element should have a lot of voice and personality. Readers want to find out what’s weird and crazy about a exotic, far-away place, maybe that they’ve never been to but dream of going to, and they want to find out about that place through a cool and funny person. Uiggu’s your girl, doitashimashite!

Religion, everywhere and nowhere

I’m not a religious person at all really, which is why I relate to Japanese religiousity. They say a nihonjin is born Shinto, marries Christian, and dies Buddhist. Religious holidays are more of a cultural tradition than a celebration of faith. I like the Japanese way; I’m pro using religion for your own means, as opposed to feeling like you have to prove yourself to God or whoever all the time. Not to say that the Japanese are nonbelievers, or that religion in Japan is simple, because actually it’s super complicated.

Like so many other things, the Japanese have taken foreign religions and made them into something of their own. But this weird blend of faiths has left some confused. My host mom was relieved when I told her I wasn’t very religious and didn’t really believe in anything. Other young people I talked to felt a sort of transience between religions, not knowing a whole lot about any particular one, but having exposure to the main Shinto, Christianity and Buddhism.

Religion demands a lot of time, something that most nihonjin, especially Tokyojin don’t have. To even get the basics of a religion down should probably take something like a few months. I took a class on Buddhist philosophy for a semester and I felt like we had only scratched the surface. So with the limiting factor of time, it doesn't seem very possible for religion to play a big role in everyday Tokyo life.

Praying when it is convenient, or when you need something, gels with my idea of the typical salaryman, student, and other types of Tokyo people. Every day is so busy, everything is so rush rush rush, and these aren’t really the type of people to be setting aside time to thank Buddha or God for what they’ve been blessed with. They’re too focused on the next thing, be it a promotion, excellent marks on exams, or a successful day at the fish market.

The closest thing I’ve had to a spiritual experience was my Fuji climb, only a few months ago. Fuji is known to have been a sacred pilgrimage site for centuries. It also used to be off limits to women, who were thought to be tainted, and incapable of enlightenment. Today Fuji is full of everyday joggers, as well as tourists and other adventurous nihonjin. Fuji-san was at the top me and my friends’ to-do list, so of course we had to go.

We rode the bus over to the fifth station, as far as buses can go, at around 9pm at night. The plan was to climb all night and make it to the top for sunrise. The first signs of drizzle weren’t unexpected, the forecast was for rain but they seemed to change all the time. There were no lights, but we had come prepared with headlights and a friend had snagged me a North Face hiking jacket/pants set. But as the rain turned into a downpour, us and all our gear got soaked and one of our girls started shivering uncontrollably, the situation got real. Two of the girls decided to stay at wherever we were at that point, at a “hotel” at the sixth and a half station, and the rest of us trucked on. It eventually got near impossible to crawl along the rain-soaked rocks, and keep climbing up and up in the oxygen deprived air. With no opportunity to get out of our soaked clothes and basically spending the night in a 3000 yen “bed” (actually a wall of sleeping bags), it was pretty much the most uncomfortable night ever. And I’ve stayed in some shitholes in China. We missed the sunrise (but made it to the top!) and missed our bus back (had to take a crazy detour to get back to Tokyo) but I completed the most challenging physical and mental task of my short two decade-span life.

I don’t believe that you have to be a true believer or feel strongly that there’s no room for religion in this life. I am comfortable where I am, feeling open to spirituality but not definitively settled on anything. Maybe it’s not that necessary to think about it all. Do the nihonjin have it right? I’ll get back to you on that.

Kawaii overload

So there's the American version of cute, and then there's the Japanese one.

If the distinction between the two isn't super great, then there's this (USA) and this (日本).

Okay. So I'm not even sure what the criteria for comparing Katy Perry in a cupcake dress with a purikura girl is, but what I'm trying to say is: in Japan there is no such thing as too cute. You can always use more bows, frills, sparkles, everything. I don’t really know what my problem is with this, girls should be able to dress however they like for the most part, but it’s just like, why don’t you know when to stop?

Anyway, emoji I can deal with. I actually like to have at least one or two in every text message, it gives emotion to a text rather than just replying with ‘k.’ It’s kind of adorable and a little hilarious that Japanese guys text with all these emoticons too, and not just with girls they have crushes on (=ﾟωﾟ)ﾉ　d(-_^)  (^_−)☆

Cute culture is everywhere and everything. Japan is also source of cuteness, who else could dream up Hello Kitty and AKB48? Otaku culture is sometimes said to be Japan’s number one export. This may be slightly insulting to some salarymen who work nonstop for car and electronics companies, but Japan’s modern cultural influence is widespread. And what do we like about it? It’s cute. Okay, with the exception of Bleach.

 Now onto me. I like cute things. You could call Hello Kitty my spirit animal. I also like stuffed animals and pretty latte art and matching cell phone charms. But that’s not all there is to my tastes. My top category on Netflix is ‘Witty TV Shows Featuring a Strong Female Lead’ a la Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Veronica Mars. Cute with a touch of badass is way more interesting to me. But if all female anime characters were suddenly like that or jpop girl groups suddenly had a rap verse in every song it wouldn’t really work out.

So what can you do? Resist cute consumer culture. Be better at fighting the urge than I am. Because when you’re dropping a hundred bucks on a giant Hello Kitty plushie dressed in a cactus suit, we have a problem.

In a time and place when we need to be more careful with our money and how we spend our time, we need to say no to the kawaii. Spend your (or your parents’) hard earned money at the supermarket. Or on sending GRE scores (so freaking expensive). We do not, and will not, need anymore cuteness.

*This whole post may have been an exercise in convincing myself that I do NOT need tokidoki jeweled thermos.

Uiggu

Uiggu, a self-described “blonde Japanese-speaking girl living in Tokyo with [her] Japanese man;” who also sometimes does things dressed as a maid for money (“NOT THOSE THINGS” she points out), runs a blog focused on food, cute unnecessary items and daily life. Mostly she blogs about her life, in which food and cute things are sometimes involved, looking at Tokyo from an Western perspective.

First looking at Et tu Tabelog, the reader is introduced to the post with the following: 

Oops, it’s been over a month since I last updated. It’s also been about that long since I went to the gym. I shall blame my quite insane schedule and my くそ 4 hour commute every day.

Uiggu’s casual speaking style and smooth incorporation of katakana give a sense of familiarity as well as authenticity on her part as a new Tokyo native. Telling us about her past month, since she didn't’ have a chance to blog about it as it was happening, in list form she gives us a rundown of what happened, assumedly in order of importance.

Right at the top of her list is “The Worst Izakaya EVER That Actually Ruined a Perfectly Good Saturday Night By Its Crapness,” which she goes on to say is not it’s actual name. Then she gives us the actual name. Giving the bar its own title, full of her own flavorful language, is humorous, and she is also revealing her personality to be witty, along with showing she’s not afraid to speak up if she’s unhappy with something. She then proceeds with a description of how to get to the bar:

All you need to remember is the…fact that it’s on the 8^th floor of that narrow building with a weird brightly-lit comics/anime shop on the ground floor and a tiny elevator which is past that expensive bar with the blue colour scheme, under the bridge and to your left if you come out of the Hachiko exit of Shibuya station and turn right.

The descriptive language lets us know that uiggu is observant, and also shows off her familiarity with Shibuya—while serving to authenticate uiggu as our tour guide of the area, we are getting her feel for the area—it’s a unflatteringly-lit difficult-to-get-to place that basically sucks. Continuing down her list, number two continues in the same vein. It details her attempt to write a “Scathing Review” (her term for it that she uses multiple times) and explains why it is such a big deal that she bothered to write it in the first place.
 We can get a good sense of her emotional state when she describes herself as “INCENSED.” Yes that is a combination of bold type, caps lock, and quotation marks. You can definitely feel her emphasis there. Uiggu also uses hyperbole pretty often:

THAT’S HOW SHITTY THIS PLACE WAS. I am not even exaggerating (and some might say I do that a lot too).

With the help of parentheses, uiggu is poking fun at herself while also once again emphasizing how angry she is.

As for linking strategies, uiggu employs the basic hyperlinking to the bar’s site and review site Tabelog. She actually links to Tabelog each time she mentions it, which, knowing that she has vowed never to use it again, may seem counterintuitive but I think she is proving a point by linking to Tabelog so many times.

Uiggu’s voice is consistent across posts, though it’s pretty easy to discern how she’s feeling at the time. In Et tu Tabelog, she displayed anger, but in other posts she’s excited or content, such as in Hand-made Valentines –OR ELSE. This post is about the Japanese approach to Valentine’s day, and how she too has been into the chocolate-making, PSP-receiving craziness.

In terms of content, uiggu blogs about pretty much whatever she comes across. This includes topics she’s stumbled upon on Reddit, her everyday bento making, and strangers she runs into at train stations. These topic choices give us a sense of her personality through what she’s chosen to write about, and what dominates even her non-topic-oriented posts. We learn about what she’s interested in and passionate about, as well as her pet peeves and what makes her angry.

Overall, uiggu’s voice definitely complements the subject matter of the blog. Basically, the blog is about her life so it follows that her voice is going to shine through it. Her voice is definitely what makes the blog fun and popular, and I think any type of blog involving a cross-cultural element should have a lot of voice and personality. Readers want to find out what’s weird and crazy about a place far away, maybe that they’ve never been to, and they want to find that out through a cool and funny person. I’m super glad I found this blog. 

Dedicated to heinous stories

Heinous Stories, a tumblog dedicated to the study abroad experience of one American college student, is actually written by a friend of mine. Who better to relate my blog to than someone who had a similar experience to me? Paku (her tumblr doesn’t require a username, and I’m going to refrain from using her real name), an Oregon native who similarly studied Japanese for a few years before making the trip to Tokyo, is fellow adventure-seeking globetrotter who spent her previous semester abroad in Chile. As a Tokyo newcomer and undergraduate student she is fairly inexperienced in the world she has immersed herself in, but she is a quick learner and has some compelling insights on the bunka, or culture of urban Tokyo.

Now that the abroad experience is over, Paku has pretty much stopped posting. However, during the semester her goal was to post every day, though she failed pretty miserably at that. It ended up being more like once every two weeks, though the posts would cover the timespan since the last.

I had some trouble finding a measure of the popularity of the blog, since it’s a tumblr url and it didn’t come up on technorati or alexa, but I think it’s safe to say that it’s fairly obscure. Paku did post a link to her blog via her facebook, which was the way I found it, but she wasn’t very actively promoting it or trying to get tumblr followers or anything like that. Her shared link got ten likes and four comments, which gives us an idea of the blog’s audience; the comments were all from friends who had been a part of the same study abroad program and were mentioned in posts on the site. Basically, it’s a pretty personal and intimate collection of posts, more like a diary that she’s letting her friends see.

Each post is a list of whatever happened in the time since the previous post, so it’s difficult to choose a real stand-out, but her final entry, post-Japan and entitled

ヽ(´▽｀)ノ(I didn’t know you could name a post with an emoticon) was a comprehensive look at the whole experience. All of her posts showcase her (in my opinion) hilarious sense of humor, and her seamless blending of Japanese and English slang. There may be a word for that, like the opposite of Engrish I guess? Another post I liked, “the blog post that i half-assed my way through just to show that i’m still posting,” was pretty entertaining, especially since I know the Rachel mentioned in the first nine items on the list, but I also like it because I can relate to falling asleep on the train and ending up at the airport and having a terrible rum and coke. Paku has some interesting and strange ideas and I’m glad she shares them on this blog.

Heinous stories is closely related to my blog in that we’re both basing our posts on this experience of being abroad for half a year. Since we were in the same program, we went to the same school, same field trips, some of the same friends, etc. Though her blog is organized in a list form, and posts don’t really have any particular theme, we’re both dealing with being confronted with a culture that is very different from our own, and slowly (or sometimes pretty rapidly) falling in love with it. Her blog is far from scholarly (aside from the fact that she is a student), filled with inane, tangential observations and inappropriate language, but she still manages to capture detail in her posts.

Most of Paku’s followers, who are friends and other members of our study abroad group, are relevant to the field in that, like us, they could be authors of blogs like this. Some are East Asian Studies majors, or interested in pursuing careers and lives abroad in Japan. We are the soon-to-be college graduates that are deciding whether or not we want to get into this field, and so are pretty relevant.

This blog is a great source of inspiration to me, I wish I could be as effortlessly funny and charismatic. Until I find that voice, I will continue to look to Heinous stories, even though it will have to be all old posts since she’s pretty much done with updating. My site will be different in organization, in that I want to base posts on some sort of main topic or idea and go from there, and try to dig a little deeper at some larger issues that bother, or I guess just occupy my mind. I want to work on making my blog more personal, which we’ve had the opportunity to do with open posts and such, but I guess the fact that it’s assigned work has made me a little reserved. In any case, hope to adopt some of Paku’s spirit into Purikura puroland and make it more clever and cute for everyone.