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.