Japan Life 2.0

A lot has happened in this last month, bad and good and in-between. First, as mentioned in the last post, we had our Class match! It was a lot of fun and each class had their own t-shirts, ours being a spoof of CalorieMate (ClassMate for our use) with quite a bit of English text on the back, written by yours truly. I don't have any photos of the dodgeball games (because I was in them,) but let me tell you, Japanese dodgeball is not American dodgeball. I expected that, but, Japanese dodgeball is NOT American dodgeball. (Please click this link for info about Japanese dodgeball.) That being said, I had a five minute breakdown before we began our first day, and the next day we walked away champions of the entire school. My team was amazing and although I got hit quite a few times I did my best to dodge and support them throughout every game. All the other sports team in our class (boys and girls volleyball) had lost in their tournaments so everyone showed up for our final game, and everyone cheered on our team until the final throw.

 (Boy's and Girl's Volleyball matches, we're in the orange!)

Class 2-8 with our Dodgeball Team Captain holding a award from the school principal.

Also at the class match, I modified the FGHS fight song a little bit to fit our class and sang it with back up clapping and chanting  at every match, sometimes with backup from the opposite team, and once with the backup of the entire gym. It was amazing to bring everyone's spirits up and show our support in a fun way, often the other classmates would nudge me and say, "Let's sing it! Let's do it!" Here's my version:

Class 2-8 our hearts go out to you!

Pink and orange, to you we will be true!

We are the mighty honeybees, let's hear it for class 2-8!

C-L-A-S-S-2-8!

(And here I took to doing a silly drum noise then yelling "GANBARE!!!" which means "Do your best!")

After the class match, school got hectic again as we all prepped for summer vacation, studying and going to clubs, as well as prepping for our Cultural Festival and Sports Festival when we return in September. Finally, a week or so after the class match we were all able to go out to dinner together to celebrate. We all met up at a fry-your-own restaurant that specializes in Okonomiyaki and ate to our hearts content. I took a lot of photos but also just enjoyed being with everyone, even if I hadn't gotten the memo that everyone would be in uniform (so I rushed home to change and refresh then biked back, spending fifty minutes on my bike and ten at home.) It was a great night and I was glad we all got to hang out together that night in celebration.

Okonomiyaki and hashbrowns!

Ayumi and I, she leaves for study abroad in America within the next two weeks!

Kiki (she is SO crazy)

Right after we all hung out, summer started with the swealtering bang of fireworks! The AFSers in my area all went together (with most of us wearing Yukatas) to view them together with our chapter head and had a great time. I really love everyone in my chapter, and I'm always glad when we can hang out. Wearing a yukata was difficult, mostly because I like taking big strides while walking, I'm not used to the sandals, and we had to sit on tarps laid on the ground! Umi was smart to wear versatile Malaysian clothing instead, but Rose just forgot altogether.

Sasha (CA, USA; WEST COAST REPRESENT!)

Rose (France) and Qing (previously mentioned as Ko-chan, China)

Umi (Malaysia)

Yamada-san! (Our chapter head and a rad dude as shown by his backward cap and sunglasses)

Sadly though, not everything has been perfect. I have a great life here in Japan and am blessed with very amazing people that care about me, but bad news still strikes.

About the middle of July, my computer crashed, causing me to lose the physical copies of almost all my photos. The ones I uploaded are still online, but all the beautiful ones I was planning to save for portfolios are gone, and most of my personal ones are too. I got my computer working again, but at the cost of a system reboot. Don't cry for me, I've moved on and am learning to back my stuff up better now and share what I can while I can. Everything's beautiful.

Another sad piece of news (and one that I don't much feel like talking about yet but needs a mention,) is that my friend and the first exchange student to stay with my family, passed away while on exchange in Argentina. I didn't know until a week after the funeral here in Japan, and her death has hit me hard in many ways. She was and will always be my big sister, and I was so excited to visit her and speak Japanese with her, this has all been so much of a shock. My host family, AFS, and my family/friends back home have been wonderful, but it's weird to think that my main reason for coming to Japan was the push her friendship gave me. Everything would be so different without her, and now I don't get to explain that to her in her own tongue.

So, update finished I guess. Life is hard, it's fun and it's not. We get up.

What Makes This Fun

It's weird to think that it's still June, the year feels like it's going so fast and it IS, but it also feels like I'll never be leaving. I know I will so that's that, but the feeling is there.

Though I'm never quite sure what to blog about, I do think about this blog a lot and about my friends and family back home. How can I share with you what I'm going through? The wonderful and terrifying (not in a bad way) experiences I have everyday. I'm not a very good writer in my opinion and I forget to take pictures because I don't want to be living behind the camera. Maybe I'll try lists of things, things that have made me really happy lately:

• The ways people laugh here, how my friends all start of quietly and build up, then fall back down again to silence. Sometimes it's fast, sometimes it's not, and I think sometimes they're surprised by my roar that comes from nowhere and ends just as abruptly. 
• Every time I ask a school friend to hang out and they say they have to study, it's annoying mostly but they're so sweet about it. They don't want to be studying.
• When people are surprised that I like Umeboshi.
• The ladies at the school store who know I'm there for the Umeboshi onigiri. 
• Wearing makeup on the weekends, feeling my glitter or red eyeshadow click everything back into place after a week of confusion.
• Singing backup at karaoke but never in the right tune or speed, sometimes just reading the lyrics deadpan or ad-libbing, and then watching the singer try not to laugh.
• The second floor of the McDonalds near the station where I go with friends when we just want to sit and talk in the middle of everyone.
• Holding hands in crowded places so nobody gets left behind.
• Watching adults play baseball so poorly that nobody is even watching them anymore, and spilling soda on myself when I cheer for them getting a home run. 
• Understanding conversational Japanese, communicating.

I'm leaving for school soon, today we don't have club and we won't until late next week. We have tests and then the class match, I'm on the girls dodge ball team. I told them about the rubber balls in the US that leave welts, how you get good at catching or you get bruises. They're terrified.


P.S. Make sure to check out my photo album (click on the photo slideshow in the right sidebar,) I update it pretty frequently and there are some photos from a Kendo tournament in there now.

Communication

I mess up in Japanese a lot, like A LOT. Sometimes it's funny, like when I accidentally said my hands were "shit" rather than "stinky" after my first day wearing the Kote in Kendo. Sometimes it's really frustrating and I want to give up, so angry that I can't make myself understood properly Usually though, at that time, we pull out a dictionary or start miming things, and it gets fun again. No matter how much I mess up, everyone here knows that it's going to happen and nobody holds it against me (not that I ever expected them to, but it is nice to know.)

Somehow all this confusion has got me studying more languages. I practice English a lot, using the little prompts given out for discussions in the International English courses (a group of students follows this course separately from the others for their entirety at school and most of them go on exchange) to write essays everyday. Sometimes they're AP Board worthy, sometimes they're just words, but it keeps my brain exercised. On top of this practice, I started to take up French again to fill the time between my breaks in Japanese and reading and trying to figure out what is going on in class, and it's been wonderful. My French is so limited now after a year without practice but I work on it little by little, and when I hang out with the other exchange students in my chapter we switch between Japanese and what we know of each other's languages, which gives me a chance to talk to Rose, from southern France.

Last week I popped out some stuff about my little sister and how good she is at French, but laughed at my own weird sounds and finished with "Je parle tres mal francais." Rose laughed and said my French was cute, and we switched back to Japanese.

Most of the time when we are together we speak in Japanese, sometimes we use english when our tongue fails us or Ko-chan (from China) wants to practice, but we speak to each other in the tongue that is new-ish to us all. It's fun, it's hard, and it's got to be weird looking in from the outside.

Now I am studying French and Spanish in my free time, not for any particular reason, but they are some of the easiest languages for an English speaker to learn and that keeps them from being too distracting from Japanese (one of the hardest.) It's fun, I'm enjoying it and I want to keep going. Who cares whether it'll be useful or not, I'm just playing and words are the best toys.

Sports Day!

Within the last week or so I've been to two sports day, and my own is only a few months off. If you don't know about sports day in Japan, here's a quick wikipedia description:

"Sports day, called undokai in Japanese, is usually held on a Saturday or Sunday in Japanese schools. During weeks preceeding the sports day, students practice their events which they would like to show their parents and friends, within their class of physical education, which often includes tamaire, performances by the school band, and presentations by various school clubs as well as individual and group competitive events. These practices, and the sports days themselves, normally take place on the schools' fields, which provides little relief from the heat and sun."

It feels like summer, but it's JUST SPRING.

Hello friends, it's been just over a month since I said I'd start updating more frequently. Hahaha. Sorry about that, I really am, and I'd like to say I have some excuse like only getting half an hour to myself everyday or I've been frantically translating for everyone in my city, but I haven't. That's okay.

Also, I've been aprehensive about updating here because, well, I'm not really sure what I want here to be. Before I knew what it was like to be an exchange student I had all these plans for things I'd do, and would still like to, without knowing the complete exhaustion that comes with only understanding about 55% of what's going on when you're not being talked to with a clear voice using vocabulary you understand. It's rough, and I'm always tired, but I've found that spending time actively talking in Japanese and enjoying myself, whether it's in Kendo or making jokes with friends or relaxing with my mom, it really helps dull the exhaustion. Sometimes it's still there and I'm unable to remember a single word, therefore losing the meaning of an entire paragraph, but it's manageable and getting better everyday.

To combat the confusion and exhaustion, I've been writing a lot more. I don't know, maybe it was two years of being taught to the AP test exactly what writing should look like (which I did voluntarily), but I haven't been reading or writing much for myself since Freshman year. Now I am, and I'm singing at karaoke clubs, and exploring cities with a friend on the back of my bike. It's nice, so I would like my blog to reflect that. Maybe I'll be updating with weird thought processes, or an essay I write in class about something that happened that day, or an open letter to people who talk about me thinking I don't understand them; maybe it will be art, maybe it will be angry. The only truth I can offer to you now is that it'll be honest, and hopefully you'll come to understand what I'm feeling like, here in a big city where I think I belong.

To end, I'm including my daily schedule because maybe I play it down, it's pretty crazy, but it's better then a lot of Japanese highschoolers.

I'm a 高校生 again!

Hello everyone, I'm writing to you exhausted from my couch after dinner on my third day of school. They haven't even been real days, Tuesday was Opening Ceremony and a short day, yesterday and today were almost all testing, and Kendo club just started. However! Japanese High School Life is interesting and a lot of fun, very different from America in ways that don't make me homesick but very excited.

Like I said, I'm really exhausted right now. During my last few weeks in America I went to school for a couple hours every other day, and it was soooooo nice, so now it's like I'm starting school all over again, which I am! Ah!

I've made some really neat friends and I'm excited to start learning about Kendo, and even though I forgot half of my speech for OC onstage I've been welcomed so much that three days feels like a lifetime.
I love it here, I'll write more soon.

We're Gonna Be Fine

Tomorrow I start high school, again. I'm very excited for this new experience but am anxious about lots of things, and however natural that may be, it still freaks me out.

As a kid I was never good at sleeping the night before a big event, I think I got that from my dad. This past fall I lied awake waiting to start my senior year, thinking it would be the last time I did so as a child, and luckily I think that'll be true. Tonight, I feel, will be full of beautiful sleep and probably a little sleep talking.

My mom informed me this morning on our way to Itsuki's opening ceremony that I'd been talking in my sleep when she woke up. I was embarrassed of course, there's always that level of embarrassment that comes with not knowing what you've said, but I realized that 寝言 (negoto / sleep talking) is just another way of communicating. Back in America, Liz would sometimes write down what I said when I talked in my sleep. My favorite, by far, was "I DON'T WANT TO GET MARRIED!" which was screamed in desperation from my party van (from an altogether amazing dream that pretty closely followed the plot of Thumbelina) and when Liz read it back to me laughing we talked about the future of the part van industry.

Maybe I don't know where I was going with this all, but that's okay. I think the point was that the weird things we think are embarrassing are probably gonna make people laugh at you in a good way (you know, the way that hopes you'll laugh along with you so that they feel safe telling you some of their own embarrassing things) and you just gotta get over it?

I have to wear a uniform tomorrow at school and give a speech to all of my peers and the school's faculty and probably the families of my fellow students, and that's scary. I get embarrassed when I can't where what I want because clothing is so important to me, but by wearing a uniform I am saying "we're the same, we can connect," and that's a pretty cool idea.