Class and the mood of Japan

It’s been awhile. I have been really busy lately. My Japanese intensive class is a lot of work. It counts for two classes but we meet for 5 times the normal amount of a normal class. Its three hours for five days a week. It’s about two or three hours of homework every day too. The teach mostly teaches in Japanese, but it’s simple enough for me to understand 70-80% of what he is saying. My understanding of Japanese is much higher than my speaking ability which really sucks because people think I can’t understand them because I can’t respond back to them so they which into simple Japanese sentences. However, simpler Japanese sentences are actually much harder to understand because it’s not normal speech and it doesn’t have many words. If I don’t understand just one of the words in a simple sentence, I more than likely can’t understand, but if it was a normal sentence, even if I didn’t know one word, I could probably understand. My host mother uses a lot of English and simple Japanese sentences which makes it hard for me to understand. My host father which doesn’t really know any English talks to me in a semi normal way and I can’t understand him almost all the time.

This last week I met another one of my language exchange partners Jiro. Jiro is a really nice person and we get along well. He actually brought his daughter along with him when we met. His daughter is 19 and very pretty. Haha, the girls here are all shy but they seem interested in foreigners. She was nice also. I’m writing in super simple sentences because I’m uncomfortable writing about this. Anyways I might see Jiro and Sakiko again some time. I know me Jiro, Yumi, and Emiko are going to an art show on the 18^th but I wonder if Sakiko is going to come. Maybe I’ll ask Jiro for her email or something along those lines. I also go to a lunch circle two times a week and the girls there are fairly talkative. The way Japanese form friendships and relationships are mostly in the context of groups and clubs (by clubs I mean organizations). I’m going to try and join a more official circle soon but I never have the time to look around.

I went to kamakura which was the old capital of Japan. It’s kind of like Washington DC in that it doesn’t have tall buildings and has lots of cultural sites to see. I didn’t much care for looking around at the temples and such but it wasn’t a bad experience.

Everyone here seems like they’re in a bad mood. You don’t really hear people talk excitedly at all. It’s one of the things Japanese always comment on about foreigners is that they talk loudly with more expressive motions and laugh loudly. It can get to you after awhile always being around people who don’t seem very happy. To compound onto that, every morning I can see delays marked on the train lines for suicide related accidents. They don’t show it in the English translation but it says it in the Japanese. I guess they don’t want tourists to know about it. There is normal a few of them listed throughout the day. Japan has the highest rate of suicide in the world. I often wonder about the causes.

I still haven’t mastered the train system. Today I took the wrong trains adding an extra 30 minutes to my commute thinking it would save time. Ah well. Today I also met my friend Yumi for lunch. It was a fairly nice restaurant. They had some good strawberry cake, but it was way too expensive for what it was. There is a cake shop near my house at my home station that has the best cake for way cheaper than I’ve found closer in Tokyo. I got my alien ID today so I don’t have to carry around my passport any more. One less worry.

Hopefully I have more free time to write these, but it looks like I’ll only have free time on the weekends and some on Wednesday.