Osaka – Round 2 – Round Up

Sorry this post is a tad late (although you really should be expecting this from me by now). The thing is, Osaka really ended up being full of surprises this time. I didn’t bring my computer because I only expected to be gone for two days. The plan was to spend the weekend there and head back Sunday morning for school. But on Friday night, one of us got a text saying that our school would be shut down until Thursday because three students got swine flu. This was the best news we could have gotten (although it does suck that three people got swine flu), and we knew that this was the start of an incredible trip.

The only issue that arose was that we had only enough clothes for two days. Actually, this wasn’t an issue at all, because it gave us an excuse to buy cool clothes in Osaka. Our first stop on the first full day of our trip was America-mura, where we bought all the clothes we needed. And more. I ended up getting some cool shoes and a sick hat as well, and my Finnish friend bought three pairs of shoes.

The hostel we stayed at was really cool too. It was basically just a house that a Japanese woman who had just finished traveling America and Europe turned into a hostel. I consider this my first experience sleeping in a traditional Japanese house, because that’s basically what it was. We met some really cool people too, and we ended up chilling at the hostel one of our nights there, talking about cultural and political topics with people from Switzerland, Argentina, Korea, and Japan. I felt so cultured. This is what I imagined traveling as a college student would be like.

And then there was Spa World. Oh, Spa World. They really couldn’t have picked a better name. It really is a world in itself. Spa World is the biggest bathhouse in Japan (I think), and it’s basically an amusement park of relaxation. It’s open 24 hours, and entrance is just $10 to stay AS LONG AS YOU WANT. That means you could stay there a whole day if you wanted to, and if you didn’t buy any food or drinks (which would be stupid if you stayed there for a day), you would just pay $10. And people actually do that. There’s a whole floor of Spa World just for sleeping. We actually ended up doing that on our last day. The original plan was to come back to Nagoya Monday night, but then we realized that we could just stay at Spa World all night and head back in the morning, and it would seriously cost us nothing extra. Spa World is fucking incredible.

Spa World has two floors that are actually spas. One is Europe themed, the other is Asia themed. Every month, men can go to one floor, and women can go to the other floor. This month it was Europe for men, so we got to go to different spa rooms with different country themes. Rome had giant statues and a bathtub of gold, Finland had saunas and really cold water, Spain had a waterfall and underwater chairs, Greece had scented baths, and Atlantis (yes, the fucking lost civilization that Plato wrote about), had saltwater baths with glass floors that had fish under them. I never knew going into different temperature water could be so much fun.

So that’s all I really have to say about this Osaka trip. Oh, and I still like Osaka best in Japan. Osaka is cooler than Tokyo. But I’m definitely gonna go back to both places again.

Stay tuned for posts about Kyoto and Hong Kong coming up.

Osaka Revisited – Part 1

Osaka is awesome.

As it turns out, there`s a case of swine flu at our school, which means we don`t have school until Thursday, which means we can stay in Osaka longer. Hell yes.

More detailed post on the way.

Tokyo – Final Day

The vast majority of my last day in Tokyo was spent in Harajuku, which was probably the most varied shopping district I’ve ever seen. The stores ranged from giant ones selling Louis Vuitton products to tiny ones selling vintage clothes. I picked up a cool bag and a flashy belt and also wandered into Kiddy World, a giant toy store that had an entire floor practically devoted to Hello Kitty. I must have spent a good three hours in Harajuku, and when I left there were still more shops I wanted to visit and more things I wanted to buy.

In retrospect, I probably should’ve just spent the whole afternoon in Harajuku. Afterwards I headed two train stations over to Shinjuku, but I only had about a half hour to explore, so as soon as I got into the heart of the district I had to turn around and head back to the station. Also, I was there at around five, and from what I gather the area doesn’t really become fun until nighttime.

Before heading back to Nagoya I had some sushi and tempura for dinner, and actually tried sea urchin for the first time. It wasn’t that bad.

Overall, I still feel like I haven’t been in Tokyo long enough to get a really good impression of it. That doesn’t mean I didn’t have fun, it just means that I still have lots of questions. One thing I wanted to know was whether Osaka or Tokyo is cooler. And I can’t really tell yet. I think they’re both really cool in different ways. Osaka is pretty mellow, but Tokyo is absolutely insane. After three days in Osaka I felt really satisfied, but after two days in Tokyo I still want more. I get the impression that Tokyo does have a lot more to offer, but I don’t think that’s entirely it. It also has to do with the vibes of the city. Osaka just has a much more laid back pace, whereas Tokyo is constantly buzzing with energy. Basically, I just really want to go back to Tokyo. There’s so much more I want to see and do. But I feel the same way about Osaka. I think that even if I stayed in Osaka for one day I would feel satisfied, and even if I stayed in Tokyo for a year I would still want more. Both cities are just so different, and that’s largely because there’s really nowhere like Tokyo. It’s a city that has so much to offer, where you can do pretty much anything, but where you can never really do everything.

Tokyo – Day 1

I woke up in my Tokyo hotel this morning around 11:00 and had a lunch of shrimp curry in the restaurant before deciding to head to Akihabara, the otaku paradise.

Remember how earlier I said that Japan isn’t weird? Well, I stand by that statement. Japan is not a weird country. But weird places definitely exist in Japan, and Akihabara is one of them. Every image of Japan that Americans have in their heads when they say that Japan is weird can be seen in Akihabara, which is the area of Tokyo where nerds go to spend all their money. In Akihabara, money can be spent on games, electronics, or talking to women dressed in maid outfits.

Yes, you read that last part right.

Akihabara is the only area in Tokyo I’ve seen where there are no clothing stores, and that’s because no one here cares about their fashion except for the women who are paid to wear weird costumes. Today I saw women dressed in maid outfits, schoolgirl outfits (both real and fake), Loli fashions, and even bunny ears. All of them were there to advertise something, and most of them were speaking in the most sickeningly sweet voices possible. I tried to take pictures of some, but they all hid from my camera, and I don’t blame them. I wouldn’t want a picture of me in an embarrassing costume taken by some random foreigner either. It must have been especially uncomfortable for them, since a lot of the guys who come here are really into these girls in kind of a creepy way. Many otaku who come to Akihabara do so to go to the maid cafes, places where men can pay to talk to women dressed in maid costumes. The whole thing just gives me an uneasy feeling. It’s a really weird subculture that I don’t want any part of. I dunno, maybe I just don’t understand it.

Anyway, after being sufficiently weirded out in Akihabara, I headed back to Ginza to walk around for a little bit before going back to the hotel. First I went to the Sony showroom, where I got to try on a pair of the most incredible noise-canceling headphones and see a dancing robot that rolled around on the floor. I decided to talk to one of the people who worked there in the strongest Nagoya accent possible to see how she would react. She looked surprised to see a 19-year-old white guy talking like an old man from Nagoya. Then I headed out into Ginza, which was filled with fancy department stores, a huge contrast from the crammed-together electronics stores of Akihabara. It reminded me a lot of Beverly Hills, although it was much more intense. I actually got to see it again tonight on my way back to the hotel to go to sleep as well. Seeing Ginza in the daytime and the nighttime showed me that Tokyo is a city which literally shines at night. Ginza was impressive during the day, but at nighttime it was a sea of color. Nighttime Tokyo is spectacularly beautiful, in kind of a Blade Runner-ish way.

After heading back to the hotel for a little bit, I went to Roppongi for one of the best meals of my life. I was with my parents, who have been visiting, and they decided to do an all-out Kobe beef meal. There must have been 10 courses in the meal we had, all of which were incredible. First a cucumber salad with scallops, salmon, and a chili sauce; then fresh tuna and shrimp sashimi; then a giant plate of swordfish, eel, eggplant, crabcakes, and fresh crab legs that could have been a meal in itself, and we hadn’t even gotten to the beef yet. When it came, we had it shabu-shabu style; a boiling pot of water was put on our table, along with three plates of raw beef and three different sauces: a sesame garlic sauce, a citrus soy sauce, and a chili sauce. The beef was like bacon; it was full of fat, but sliced so thinly that it wasn’t overwhelming, just incredibly delicious. Then we had three courses of different vegetables, followed by tofu, rice cakes, and glass noodles, all cooked in the same pot of water. Our second to last course consisted of udon noodles served in the broth that had been created from our meal. The water we had cooked everything in had absorbed all the flavors of the meat and vegetables, and tasted simply incredible. The last course was a custard served in a refreshing sugar syrup, along with a cup of green tea. By that time, I was so full I could barely move.

But I managed to get up and explore Roppongi a little bit. Roppongi is even more international than Shibuya; every restaurant I saw featured the cuisine of a different country, and I saw more diverse people than anywhere else in Japan and heard languages spoken that I didn’t even recognize. We ended our night by going to the Tokyo TV tower and seeing the view of Tokyo from up high. If I were to go to the highest point in Nagoya, I’d be able to see mountains and countryside in the distance. Even if I did that in New York I would be able to see the water where the city ended. Not the case in Tokyo. Tokyo is simply a never ending city. No matter which direction I looked, it was city as far as I could see. It makes Nagoya look like a small town.

That’s why I’m not quite ready to head back to Nagoya tomorrow. I feel like I just got a taste of Tokyo, like I just barely scratched the surface. But I do feel better knowing that no matter how long I spend in Tokyo, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to fully understand it. It’s just too big and too complex. I feel like no matter how much I do in Tokyo, there will always be more that I’ve missed.

Tokyo – Day 0.5

As I was sitting in a taxi, speeding away from Tokyo station after arriving on the shinkansen, I thought to myself, “yeah, I’m definitely in Tokyo.” After being here for about… um… 4 hours, I feel it’s safe to say that a lot of the things I’ve heard about Tokyo are true. The sights of tall buildings, giant advertisements, flashing lights, and giant flashing advertisements on tall buildings corresponded perfectly with every image of Tokyo that I already had in my head.

To be fair, I’ve only been two places in Tokyo so far: Ginza, where my hotel is, and Shibuya. And I haven’t actually seen much of Ginza. I basically got to my hotel around 9, dropped off my stuff, and got on the subway to Shibuya.

Shibuya was a giant collage of various flashing advertisements, some placed on high buildings advertising expensive products, and some with arrows on them advertising local shops. I had a craving for spicy food, since it’s hard to find in Japanese cuisine, so I found a Turkish kebab stand and bought a kebab and a coke. Eating Turkish food (which almost tasted like Mexican food), drinking an American drink, and wandering around one of the most famous neighborhoods in Japan, I felt really international. And Shibuya was a really international place, probably the most international place I’ve been to in Japan. I saw black people, white people, and of course Asian people, and heard American English, British English, Jamaican English, Irish English, French, and of course Japanese being spoken. The other thing about Shibuya was that everyone was young. I saw a few older businessmen here and there, but almost everyone looked under 30.

Before I headed back into the train station to brave the stampede of commuters, I stood there for a minute and tried to soak in the surrounding neon lights that were saturating me with color. Generally I can’t stand advertisements, but if anyone tried to convince me that advertising was an art form, then they could show me a picture of Shibuya and maybe make me reconsider. They still wouldn’t convince me though.

The Universal

So it’s been a while… again… sorry. Maybe I’m not living up to my goal of one post a week. But I’ll make it up to you when I start traveling more. I hope.

Anyway, this week’s post is about language again. By now, you can probably tell that I’m more than a bit of a language otaku. That’s one of the main reasons I came to Japan: to learn how to speak Japanese well. The process of doing so has been incredibly challenging, frustrating, and headache-inducing, but since I love languages, and since I know the end result will be worth it, I’m finding it very rewarding. But I know that it’s very easy for people to get crushed by the difficulty of learning another language. Many Americans who aren’t willing to go through the challenges of learning another language will only be able to travel certain places without being completely unable to communicate.

Or will they?

A global language has been a dream for some and a nightmare for others. While one would undoubtedly be convenient, it would also undoubtedly lead to cultures being dramatically homogenized. I’m personally in favor of there being a huge multiplicity of languages, but obviously since I’m a linguistics student and I like learning languages my opinion is slightly biased. But many people who want there to be a global language also have biased opinions. And here’s why:

If there were to be a global language, it would without a doubt be English. English pretty much is already a global language. Everyone in Japan learns English in middle school, and every foreign student in my program can at least understand English, even if they can’t speak it. The fact that English is already a global language kind of bothers me, since it’s basically a direct result of British and American imperialism, both in the literal sense and in the sense of cultural imperialism. This is why people who want a global language still have biased opinions. Since the default global language is English, native English speakers have huge amounts of privilege. (To be fair, Spanish is also somewhat of an international language, and Chinese is very likely to become one, but neither one is nearly as global as English is right now.)

I’ve seen and experienced this privilege many times already in Japan. I recall one time when I was just sitting outside, minding my own business, and a bunch of Japanese students came up to me and said (in English) “Hello. Where are you from?” Normally I want to meet as many Japanese students as I can, but something about what they said just irritated me. My immediate thought was “Why are you asking where I’m from? You’re already making assumptions about where I’m from.” Because I’m not Asian, it’s always assumed that I speak English, and it’s usually assumed that I’m American. An Australian person here told me that because he speaks English everyone just assumes he’s American. To be honest, it bothers me, not because I’m an outsider, but because there’s no reason why I should have this privilege, there’s no reason why someone from, for example, Italy, should automatically be expected to speak English, and there’s no reason why “American” should be viewed as standard.

So in one sense a global language already exists, and it’s English. But there’s also a more positive, philosophical, pretentious answer to the question of a global language. I’ve learned from my classes that art and math are both global languages. I’m taking one art class and one math class this semester, both of which are taught in Japanese. But I can understand them, because both art and math are designed to communicate ideas without using natural languages. It’s amazing that two totally different ways of thinking would essentially serve the same purpose: to communicate ideas without using language. So art and math are both languages that everyone can understand, at least if they put in the effort of learning about them. But with art and math everyone starts from the same place: knowing nothing. So when these “languages” are used to communicate, no one has an advantage.

So, basically, global languages do exist, and that’s not always a good thing. Language is obviously an essential part of human existence, which is why it’s not fair for certain people to have advantages when they use it.

Beautiful Ground

Today I saw one of the most beautiful sights of my life. Here’s what happened.

I had class at Toyota today, and someone in my class invited me to come see her dance group after class. So I ended up leaving Toyota at around 6:50, about an hour later than usual (isn’t it weird how cool things happen whenever I commute between Nagoya and Toyota at unusual times?). When I got on the bus to go to the subway station, I had my iPod out, like I always do, and I was listening to Cornershop, probably one of the chillest bands to ever come out of England. The bus went through a residential neighborhood and came out of it onto an open highway surrounded by rice paddies just as the sun was setting, and just as the epic orchestral part on “Brimful of Asha” was starting. The sky was a little cloudy, but what you could see behind the clouds was just entirely purple. And the image of the clouds covering a giant purple sky was reflected on the wet rice paddies. Everything I could see, from the rice paddies on the ground to the clouds in the sky, was purple. It was absolutely beautiful, and uniquely Japanese. I’m sorry that I’m describing it without showing a picture, but I didn’t have my camera with me, and even if I did I don’t think I could take a good picture from inside a moving bus. But next time I will bring my camera, and if I stay longer at Toyota I’ll try and capture this image so I always have it. Although I don’t think I’ll forget it.

Halfway Home

When I woke up yesterday morning, I did the same thing that I do every morning: I reached for my phone to check what time it was. And when I did, what I saw shocked me. Yesterday was June 1st. It’s already June. That means I’m halfway through. I’ve already been here two entire months, but they’ve gone by so quickly. And I’ve only got two of those quick months left. To be fair, I’ll actually be gone for three more months, but only two of them will be spent in Nagoya. I really want to enjoy these next two months, but I already know that they’ll be even more fun than the last two. For one thing, I spent the last two months getting used to the country and the city, but now I’m more or less used to it and I’ll be able to experience Japan from slightly more of an insider’s perspective (although I’m still completely an outsider and always will be. That’s actually what the title of this blog means). And, to make things even more exciting, these next two months will be filled with even more friends and travel. Not only have I become better friends with the other international students as well as a lot of Japanese students, but I’ll be seeing two of my friends from home and going to exciting places with them. In July I’ll be going to Hong Kong (although I still have to work out the details) and in August Hokkaido and Korea (won’t be going to Nepal after all, it’ll be Hokkaido instead. Which will be good, because I have other friends going there, and it’ll be way less unbearably hot than Nepal, or the rest of Japan for that matter). And to top that all off, I’ll be seeing what are probably Japan’s three most exciting cities: Tokyo, Osaka (again), and Kyoto. Of course, I’ll have a lot to write about, and will try and be better about posting on these places than I was with Nagano.

But what about what already happened? I’m trying to evaluate my progress on my goals for Japan and how I’m doing so far, but it’s a little difficult, since I’m still in the middle of things. But I’ll try. Here are some of my goals, and how I think I’m doing on them.

1. Get better at Japanese

This was one of the most important ones for me. And I’m getting better. But I still have a long way to go. But since my goal was just “get better,” I guess I’ve already accomplished this one.

2. Learn to cook

Maybe this seems like a weird one. But before I came here all I could cook was quesadillas and grilled cheese sandwiches, which are basically the same thing, and since I’m living in an apartment now, and will be again when I return, I figure it would be good to be able to make more balanced meals. And besides, what better place to improve my cooking than Japan, right? (Well, except maybe Italy, France, or Mexico). I’m doing alright on this one. I can make some more simple things, like fried rice, miso soup, and some pretty good tasting grilled meat and vegetable dishes. Basically if I keep it up while I’m here I’ll be able to cook enough for when I get back.

3. Do karaoke with Japanese businessmen

I already accomplished this goal a long time ago. Like, when I hadn’t even been here a month. And to be honest this one was kind of a joke goal. So I’m really happy with how this one turned out.

4. Make connections in Japan and other places in the world

This one’s totally been accomplished. I’ve already been invited to come back to Japan, as well as to come to Finland, Amsterdam, and Australia.

5. Mosh with Japanese punks.

I’ve already done this one twice.

6. Get some crazy Japanese clothes

I already have one really cool shirt, but I’m still working on getting some crazy pants and shoes.

These are just some of my goals. I have many more as well, some serious and some fun, but I’m obviously still working on them.

What about my expectations about Japan? Of course I had preconceptions about what Japan would be like, and it’s interesting to see how accurate or inaccurate they have been. Like, for one thing, I thought that the food would be healthier here. But that’s not true at all. Well, maybe it’s healthier than in America, but it’s not all healthy. There’s fried food everywhere. It’s easy to be healthy here, but it’s even easier not to be. Or, as another example, one of the pieces of advice I was given was to always be early, since things always start on time here. But they don’t. Everything, at least at my school, always starts late (just like at my home college). I dunno, I can’t really think of any other good examples right now, but there have been little differences to a lot of the things I expected. But, on the other hand, I knew when coming here that nothing would be like how I imagined it, so it’s not really a big deal.

Anyway, my stay in Nagoya is halfway through. Of course, the thought of extending my stay has occurred to me more than a few times, but I do know that I have to return home for several reasons. Still, the fact that I want to stay longer is proof that I’ve already accomplished my most important goal here, which was just to enjoy my time in Japan.

Country House

So it’s been a while, and I’m sorry about that. It’s not because I’ve been slacking off though. I’ve actually been really busy. Plus, I gave you three posts two weeks ago, and since my goal was one post a week, if I do one this week I’m still ahead of the game.

Also, I apologize that this post is about something that happened a few days ago. As you can probably tell, when I want to put a story on this blog I try to do it the day that it happens so it’s still fresh in my mind. But, as I’ve said, I’ve been really busy.

Anyway, over the weekend I went on my second trip within Japan, to Nagano prefecture with most of the other students in my program, as well as a bunch of Chinese students. My university here is INSANELY rich (a nice contrast from my school in the states) and they own what they call a “seminar house” which is really just a cross between a mansion and a luxury hotel in the middle of nowhere in Nagano. And when I say the middle of nowhere, I mean the middle of nowhere. Isolated places are really, really hard to find in Japan, since the country is so densely populated. To give you an example, I commute to Toyota twice a week, which reminds me of American suburbs, but which everyone here calls the countryside. And one time I went on a field trip to Inuyama city, which also looks like a suburb, but which our teacher called the countryside. Basically, the equivalent of an American suburb is about as isolated as you can get in Japan, and there are hardly any truly isolated places.

Except for in Nagano prefecture, apparently. Nagano is the most mountainous region of Japan, and because of that it was absolutely gorgeous. The seminar house was in the middle of the woods, and the scenery was beautiful. But I’ll get to that later. First I want to talk about the trip there.

Nagano is about four hours from Nagoya, and our first stop on the way was to have one of the most intimidating meals of my life. Now, I love Japanese food. It’s one of my favorite cuisines, and I haven’t had trouble eating anything here so far. Except for this first meal. There were tons of plates with lots of different stuff on them, and I couldn’t tell what a lot of it was. There were various pickled vegetables, some of which I tried, and none of which really appealed to me. Other students said that one of the pickled vegetables was an unripened olive, so I stayed away from that one. There was this weird flavorless jelly that was supposedly made from seaweed was so slippery that I could barely eat it with chopsticks. There were whole tiny fish, deep fried with the heads still on. These actually didn’t taste that bad. I covered them in soy sauce, and the deep frying covered up the taste hid the head from obvious view. The main dish was a rice bowl with meat, various vegetables, and soy sauce. It looked good, but it didn’t taste quite the same way. For one thing, it was one of the saltiest things I’ve ever eaten. But I think mainly, the meal was pretty fancy, and my western palate just wasn’t used to these sophisticated Japanese tastes. Anyway, I’m glad that I tried everything.

Next, we stopped at the wasabi museum (yes, there is one). They had wasabi ice cream, wasabi juice, wasabi beer, wasabi everything. But none of it actually tasted like wasabi. The ice cream and the juice had the faintest taste. The beer was just green beer.

When we finally got to the seminar house, I had one of the best meals of my life. It consisted of sashimi, various pieces of grilled fish, grilled steak with miso sauce, and grilled vegetables, as well as a few tiny bites of other things. It was absolutely incredible. The ingredients were fresh, and prepared simply but wonderfully. It was the best of Japanese cooking, simple, but exquisite, and beautifully presented.

That night, the staff provided us with lots of drinks, and I had my first Japanese bath, which was incredible. It was one of the most relaxing things I’ve ever done, although 20 minutes was enough.

Anyway, that’s pretty much it. On the way back we stopped at a pottery place to make pottery, and at one of the oldest Japanese castles, but by then I was really tired from the night before. Overall, though, the trip was a lot of fun, and the area was really beautiful.

With The Dark

3 blog posts in one week! A new record!

I had to post today, because today I had one of the strangest experiences of my life.

To give a little background, one of my classes is Media Art (if you’ve been reading this blog religiously, which you should, then you know that already). This class meets at the Toyota campus, which is about an hour away from Nagoya, on Thursdays from 4:20 to 5:50. I have about an hour and a half after my first afternoon class to commute from Nagoya to Toyota. Today, I had to run a few errands, so I took a later train and ended up getting to the Toyota campus about 15 minutes after class had started.

And here’s where it gets weird. As I was walking to class, I saw one Japanese student guiding another student who was blindfolded. I thought to myself, “hmm… that’s strange” and continued on my way to class. When I got out of the elevator to go to class, I immediately bumped in to my professor, an old Japanese guy with a huge beard, who was also guiding another blindfolded student. He said to me in Japanese, in that incredibly excited way that only professors can say things, something like “oh good, we have another student. You can guide this student instead of me.” He then told me to guide the blindfolded student to the second floor of the cafeteria to buy snack food, and I was so confused that I didn’t even ask why, and just said OK. While I was guiding the student, I asked him why we were doing this, and he said he had no idea. I felt bad for him, since he hadn’t even seen me, but since he could tell from my bad Japanese that I was obviously the only foreign student in the class. And I had to guide him, blindfolded, in my bad Japanese. To give you some idea of how difficult this was for me, and how bad it must have been for him, I don’t even know the word for “stairs.”

Anyway, we got to the second floor of the cafeteria with no one getting hurt, and he bought food, and then told me that I had to put on the blindfold. Again, I asked him why our professor was making us do this (using a new grammatical structure that I had just learned), and he told me he had no idea. So he blindfolded me, and guided me somewhere. I don’t know my way around the Toyota campus, so when he removed my blindfold I had no idea where I was. All I could tell was that we were in a room with most of the other students in the class (a few hadn’t arrived yet) and the professor. I actually got a chance to talk to the professor, who’s a really interesting guy. He knew the work of Bill Brand, my film professor from college, and he told me about a lecture on Japanese film that’s happening in a few weeks. Oh, and I asked him why we did the blindfold thing, and he gave me the wonderfully ambiguous answer “so you can write about it for homework.”

And here’s where it gets weirder. After everyone arrived, we went into a different room that was completely dark. There were no lights, and I couldn’t see anything. There was a rail in the room that people started following, but eventually it ended and I was just standing in this completely dark room. Then the teacher started giving instructions. And I had no idea what he was saying. Usually, since I’m far from fluent in Japanese, I can’t understand what the teacher is saying. But in a classroom where I can see visual examples, and where, for that matter, I can actually SEE, this isn’t an issue. But now I was unable to see anything or understand anything I was hearing. You might think I was scared, but by this point I was just laughing, in kind of a “how the fuck is this happening?” way. The thing that made me feel better is that even though I couldn’t understand the instructions, and therefore wasn’t following instructions, the teacher couldn’t tell, since he couldn’t see either. Eventually, I could tell from the sounds that people were sitting down in chairs at tables, so I found one and sat down in it. Then people started opening the food we had bought, and passing it around. I had no idea what I was eating, but most of it tasted good. Then, after about 10 minutes, the professor turned the lights on, and the exercise ended. I have absolutely no idea what the point of it was.

I think, since it’s a media art class, that he was trying to teach us to rely on our other senses. But I could be wrong. Maybe if I had come to class on time I would know. While I was talking to the professor, though, he did ask if I did this before in Bill Brand’s class (I didn’t). So maybe it’s a common exercise for media professors to do. If you’ve done it before, could you let me know what the point of it is?

Anyway, this experience was totally a unique one for me. When I’m in class and can’t understand the professor, I can rely on visuals. And when all the other students couldn’t see today, they could rely on what they heard. But today I couldn’t rely on either. So if the point was to teach me to rely on my other senses, then I definitely learned that today.

Also, on an unrelated note, but related to my previous post, I noticed while we were throwing away the food wrappers today that no one would throw away a food wrapper that still had food in it. As I said before, people are more considerate with their trash here.