ダニエルの冒険

Had a pretty good day today. I’m trying to ease myself out of Japan-mode gradually, which basically means I’m spending loads of time in and around Japan Town. This and next weekend it’s the Sakura festival and there’s loads on. The streets are all closed off and pedestrianised, with small stalls selling stuff and a stage set up in Peace Plaza, where there were taiko drumming and para para performances. The Taiko was really great and I’m thinking of going to their concert next Saturday night at the Kabuki hotel. I found the Japanese school I was looking for this morning and saw all this drumming after getting some oyako-don for lunch while waiting for the class to start at 1pm. From 1pm to 4pm I participated in the class, but I’m still not sure if I’ll take it or not.

The school has its classes broken up in a few ways. There’s one series going from beginner right up to “Intermediate 6″, which all follow textbooks. The problem is, I’m already past all those books. I’ve already studied everything up to “Intermediate 6″, their highest class in the textbook based classes. After that, there are kanji, reading and “practical communication” classes. Reading isn’t interesting to me, in that all you do is learn vocabulary and it gets boring really quickly. Kanji classes teach you 500 characters in the whole course. I had that many going to Japan in January, so that’s not an option. Practical Communication was pretty good, but it’s totally disconnected from the graduated classes going up to intermediate level. Intermediate 6 seems to bring you a little bit into intermediate Japanese. Practical Communication goes right past intermediate and straight into high-level Japanese, which is what I was doing today. We were reading newspapers, which are full of formal phrases that I’ve never studied, and lots of difficult kanji, but it does help my learning.

I’m not concerned about the teaching. The teacher, Sato-sensei, is funny and answers questions helpfully and kept the class going at a good and well-timed pace. The other students are all American except for one Chinese girl. The Chinese girl’s Japanese is really great and she has a small Chinese accent but it only comes out when she says “kara” (‘because’), but it always does with Chinese. Her intonation is great too. There’s an asian-american kid called Kevin who’s got really great spoken Japanese too and his kanji and probably vocabulary are a good bit better than mine. Out of the other four, one is a middle-aged man, two are elderly gentlemen, and one is a girl in her twenties. The older guys all have really strong American accents and I thought it was funny how they sounded exactly like the parodies of Americans on Golden Eggs.

After class I had an hour to spare before meeting up with Jonathan from work to eat sushi for dinner so I went to the Japanese mall and wandered around a bit and found a video shop on the bottom floor. I spoke to the girl selling movies at the door for a while and bought a “lucky bag” of burned DVDs of Japanese TV for $10, then got to roll around this bingo machine thing for a draw, got a white ball, and that got me a free DVD from a big stand of them. Another girl working there helped me pick one out. It was interesting that most of them were burned from a PC. Most Japanese TV shows aren’t licensed to publishers in this country, so if they burn and sell them, no one’s going to chase after them. There are a couple of dramas being aired on TV and a few films are licensed, subbed/dubbed and republished in the west, but in variety TV shows, comedians, and music generally aren’t at all.

I met up with Jon and we played Super Smash Bros. Brawl on his Wii for an hour (of course, a game that uses Havok’s physics engine), and then went to the sushi place were I got a plate with seven slices of salmon sashimi and two toro onigiri sushi. I ordered in Japanese and the waitress kindly spoke back in Japanese and used it when asking if I wanted rice or water and stuff.

Today I managed to feel like I was just as sharp with my Japanese as I was three weeks ago, which is a great feeling. I spoke with no problem to my teacher, administrative class, other students, and people I met at shops in Japan Town.

You might be thinking “don’t waste your time! You’re in San Francisco and spending all your time in the small Japanese area!”. It’s true though. Today I was reading Hagakure on the muni all the time and it was incredibly interesting. There are some things which seem silly, such as “don’t sneeze in public as you will appear foolish”, but there are some useful rules on dealing with people, making important decisions, keeping a strong character… that sort of thing.

There are so many characters in this city. Let’s take Lee for example. He’s a gentleman I met at the Social Security Administration. I ran into him again today on a bus. He’s in his 70s and business card contains everything from motion pictures and TV actor to horseman to system-analyst investigator to university teacher. He told me he does some career advice too. It also says he’s a private investigator.

Another person I saw today… a guy in a wheelchair on the bus. He kept saying “move it or lose it” to the people in front of him. There was a lady who was about 100 years old at the front of the bus (seriously… she wasn’t a day under 94 anyway) and she had to lift her feet up onto the seat to let him pass and I think he realised he was being a bit of an eejit when she was saying something about him rolling over her feet.

I got off the bus and a black guy got off in front of me and was dancing to music as he walked to the BART station. I was walking behind him and as he was walking down the stairs, he stopped, made an X with his forearms and did a dance move, then realised I was behind him and he was slowing me down, so he went back to his walking-dancing.

I’m liking this city, but I’ve been spoiled by the excellent public transport in Japan and my dad’s car in Ireland so it’s a bit of work to get anywhere, especially when you don’t know the routes and timetables so well. It’s so nice having Japan Town to run away to. It’s all so familiar and comfortable and it’s just like being at home in Japan.