An exchange student from my same uni who came the semester before me had her last day today; we went to her apartment (which was in an area we'd never been to before) and basically took as much stuff as we could that she'd have trouble throwing away, including a toaster oven, futon, umbrella, bag of spices and bag of frozen spinach - what we don't keep we can really easily throw away, because the apartment building will help us figure out how to properly toss it. We walked 20 minutes with all this to the subway station (luckily the subway was like empty at this time), got off the subway after like 3 stops and then walked like an hour (all in all, 5km) in the blazing sun while everyone stared and/or grinned at us.

It must be pretty rough for her - not only did she not manage to find a way to stay in Japan, but she was home sick for like 50% of the time she was here AND she's in exactly the same boat as me with this whole crazy teacher not letting her pass the degree class thing. She didn't even know you could get moving boxes at the 100 yen shop, after living here for a year and a half, which makes me think she didn't exactly get out much in general. Aaaand while her Japanese certainly improved, I'm not exactly sure how MUCH it improved...

Well, I've got 10 potential jobs (of which many of them might be too old to apply to already - Japanese people stop hiring FAST!) to apply to tonight, and some easy homework to do. Today and yesterday have been "good mood" days so I've gotta max out my motivation/energy before I get another mood swing lol...

managed to squeeze out a drabble for samurai flamenco (warning, spoilers for some end-of-series stuff):

https://archiveofourown.org/works/14745360

then i went to check out other people's fics for that series, as is my habit whenever i write something. and every single one i clicked felt like it was written by a 12-year-old. which is an experience i've been having with basically all of my fandoms in the past 10 years, except for Due South. sigh.

finally got the process to get the medicine i was using in sweden in japan. basically i went to the only clinic for this in town that spoke english (the local government has a handy list of which clinics officially speak english, chinese, korean, etc), brought with me an unopened package of medicine, an official paper from my swedish hospital saying i "have x illness and use y medicine" (both of which weren't in english but in the end it was just fine), my health insurance card and resident permit card (which also functions as an ID card). all that stuff turned out to be necessary, though they never opened the medicine package to check it was actually what it said it was so maybe the empty box would've been fine.

the nurses don't speak ANY english, not even days of the week or hours of the clock, which is what i also experienced in iceland (but isn't true at all for sweden). as is normal in every country apparently, absolutely no english inside the hospital in general (like, no signs in english for example) nor anything actually noting on the hospital's website that the doctor can speak english. the doctor himself spoke in a mix of half-japanese and half-english, but it seemed completely unintentional, like he just never speaks english so doesn't even realize he's using japanese. he wrote some instructions for me (on how to take the urine test) in english and that was flawless though. the doctor was one of those that's so good at his job he only takes like two seconds to do it, which is what i keep experiencing over and over here in japan (and have experienced a couple times in sweden... but never in the USA). obviously the clinic doesn't get many english-speaking patients but at the same time the nurses didn't seem like i was the only english-speaking one they've ever had (at any rate i spoke entirely in japanese with all the nurses, i just made mistakes).

so basically i can't get my medicine until 2-3 weeks from now. they have to do a ton of random tests - today i did a urine and blood test, and got my height, weight, blood pressure, thyroid, spine, breathing etc checked (all of which went amazingly fast). one reason for having all these tests is that the dosage i had in sweden was 4x higher than the legal limit in japan, because of stuff like a high dose causing liver damage lol. japan's apparently figured out that if you do x lower dose, your body naturally reacts to it in such a way that you end up at the proper level of what you need about a week afterwards, instead of the swedish method where you kinda just overload your body in order to get covered from day one.

anyway, it's now thursday (at 2 in the morning). "tomorrow" i'll know if i got the job or not. on that same day i also have my first tutoring session where a japanese student is supposed to help me with japanese (i specifically asked to be helped with the kind of polite grammar that helps in getting/keeping jobs), and the last class session for my BA thesis writing prep class.

i'm living in an apartment building for tohoku university (a huuuuge university) exchange students... and on saturday starting at 9am we're supposed to take part in a 5-6 hour emergency drill session. first we practice a fire drill which takes 1-2 hours, then we get on a bus and go to tohoku university to get first aid training, experience the earthquake simulation truck which i've already been in at my own university, have the disaster government-rationed food which i can't eat anyway, listen to a lecture on how to prepare and why preparedness is important etc. supposedly attendance is pretty mandatory in that they'll be doing a roll call and everything but i plan on skipping out and just telling the apartment receptionist that i have work and can't come. some of my classmates are going to claim the same thing so we'll see lol. not only have i already done some of this stuff (like, although it was years ago, i did take first aid classes in the USA in order to get certified, and i figure if i take them at all in japan i should do it in a way where i'm certified too), but i figure i'll have to do it all AGAIN at future jobs, schools, apartments etc in japan anyway so i'm not exactly worried. because near to sendai was the big earthquake and tsunami that killed a ton of people and obliterated a few towns, they're really keen on disaster preparation. which isn't bad, but it's just like, not 6 hours on a saturday starting at 9am please.

my last class from my swedish school is on friday (same day as when i'll hear if i got the job or not). the final version of my BA thesis proposal hasn't been graded yet, but it's been put up publically along with 3 other students' (one student's is missing) so i assume that means it passed. but since i don't know and this teacher is so crazy, i'll keep being wary. also even if i passed this final turn-in that doesn't necessarily mean i've passed the course overall, sadly.

during the last class we're supposed to read the other people's proposals and critique them. so i started reading them, and guess what. the very first one is lacking stuff the teacher told me i HAD to include in MINE, for example "sample data"! it's written so confusingly that you read the whole paper and still have no clue what they're going to do, and is riddled with grammar mistakes (stuff like turning a sub-clause into a new sentence, using a plural verbform when it should be singular, and misusing semi-colons). the girl who wrote this already has a master's degree in another subject so unlike the rest of us she doesn't have the excuse of "not knowing how to write a passing paper".

in other news, yesterday and today is the biggest festival of the whole year in sendai (with the main part being today). i tried filming a little yesterday and will try more today, then link it here. i could barely sleep so i dunno how long i can stay out... i'll go try to sleep more now.

gotta go to the doctor this week to try and sort my medicine out... unfortunately i noticed that the only real paper i have proving that the medicine is mine (except for having the actual unopened medicine itself, which has my name on it) is written in swedish and not english. so i'm gonna hand-write a translation on top of it and just kinda hope they accept the two together as legit.

have a ton of tabs open about stuff like "how do you know if you got the job or not" - first looking at ones in english and then in japanese, but most of the japanese ones are just blatant translations of american articles. eventually i landed on an american forum with people of all different types of education/job searching/etc talking about how getting interviews has gone. WOW there are some HORRIBLE stories on here!!

one person said the staff literally changed the name of the position he was applying to three times during the whole process (once after seeing his resume, once after interviewing him, once during the rejection message). other people said stuff like the interviewer had his feet up on the desk and was messing with his laptop the whole time, or the staff literally told them they had the job, they got "hired" and started the training process, and then suddenly got a call saying they weren't going to be hired anymore. or right when they walked into the room for the interview they were told someone was already hired and that they should just go home. or the interviewer literally told them they had no idea what the job was about and that they were going to send everything the guy said to their friend so their friend could make sense of things for them.

from reading various american articles i've learned some random stuff i had no idea about in the "american job hunt process" too - like that an interviewer might swear during the interview, or that you're supposed to send a thank-you email after the interview o.0 i knew they'd ask you really weird, tricky questions about the business and stuff but holy hell i had NO idea JUST how much americans'll try to trick you! any little sentence could be a trick, and they'll come out of nowhere with some random unrelated shit that if you don't answer perfectly you're screwed! i'm SO glad i'm not living in the USA anymore...

sweden's not really any better, in that sweden's actually trying to copy america's business style more and more, which includes how they conduct interviews and screen people. on top of that, just like the US there's basically no jobs in sweden.

semi-related but i'm trying to learn how to "iron" my clothes using the steam from the shower/bath now... if i just "iron" a couple things this way after every time i take a bath, they'll always be ready for whenever i need them, eh? also thinking that maybe i can just plain "wash" certain kinds of clothes this way and then i won't need to waste 200 yen on using the washing machine as much... apparently if you buy a clothes steamer, which costs i don't know how much and supposedly works better than an iron, you can use it for stuff like cleaning your carpet or mattress or bathroom tiles too. unlike in sweden where carpet is basically unheard of, in japan a loooot of places have carpet...

anyway, even after reading all these articles on "did you pass the interview or not?" i'm still uncertain. i just think that people can have a good time with you and be really nice and seem interested and etc but still actually hire someone else. even though it's a job where they don't require experience or anything... i wish i knew how many people they were hiring, because for example if it were 10 i think i could be sure i got the job.

i think i did really good in the daycare interview! they were really impressed by my japanese level (the lady said "you're so good at japanese!" three times - and she's the BOSS of the place), that i brought a resume in JP and ENG (she wasn't expecting me to bring a resume at all!), and was impressed that i had visited an elementary school that was like two streets down from the daycare. also saying "i already need to move out of the place i'm in now, so i'll move closer to the workplace if i get the job" seemed to make a good impression, as right before i said it the lady's tone of voice seemed to mean "if you live that far away i won't hire you".

online it said for interviews you need to wear a black suit/tie/shoes/bag and have a white shirt, i had a black suit with blue-white plaid shirt and no tie, my bag is blue and brown and my shoes were brown. at the end i asked if my clothes were okay and they laughed and said they were fine, which i take to mean "we weren't expecting you to wear nice clothes" so i'm really glad i didn't wear the white shirt! when they said "we'll contact you about if you get the job or not" i asked when the contact would be since i'd also applied for some other jobs, and they said "by next friday" and i said "that's fast!"...

i SHOULDN'T'VE worn any nice shoes because the walkway to the office was wooden planks on top of sand/dirt, which was at the time flooded and muddy due to the rain. the staff didn't even glance at my shoes or bag anyway (i only met two staff members - Boss Lady and Secretary Lady, who both wore normal daycare lady outfits, which basically equals a long flowery apron). also, to get into the place they have a gate thing and you have to read the sign to know you're supposed to press the intercom button and announce who you are, then to get out you have to read the sign to know you have to press the black button to unlock the gate. in both places the buttons were kinda hidden, like the black button you only saw if you actually crouched down : /

anyway, no tour of the building, didn't meet any of the english-speaking staff etc. there was no explanation about work duties, no asking about my experience, etc. it was pretty much entirely a "in a very basic sense what kind of person are you, where do you live and what do you study" thing, which i'm coming to find is veeeeeeery normal in japanese society. they asked me:

• are you a student? at which school? what are you studying?
• is japanese difficult? (= the most difficult thing is the meanings listed in the dictionary for words and kanji are wrong and are different from their usage in real life)
• where do you live? how did you get here? (= two trains)
• will you be studying while working here?
• which job are you interested in, part-time or full-time?
• do you have a part-time job right now? what is it? (= english teaching), is it for a company or private?
• where did you see the job ad from?
• how long have you been in japan? how long have you studied japanese? where do you come from? where (= which country) did you start studying japanese?
• (after i mentioned i have a wife) you're married? is your wife japanese? is she also a student, or what's her job?
• (when i said i brought my resume in japanese too) did you write this japanese yourself? (to which i answered "yes, so maybe it's full of mistakes" and she replied "no, no!" and laughed)
• so you're intending to live in japan forever, right? (she guessed this after i said i loved japan lol)

and that's about it. that was the whole interview. not one bit of special polite language (only basic, standard "desu / masu"). the only thing was they said "gokurou sama deshita" about five times, which is your clue to leave as it basically always means either "see you later" or "hey nice to see you", so i said "thank you very much" five times back, because i don't know what you're actually supposed to SAY in response to that. i think you just repeat it back at them but i'm not sure so i thought "thanks" was a safer bet. bowing every time you say it of course.

i really, really, really hope i get the job!! !! !! !!!! but i have no idea how many people they're hiring, what kinds of people with what kinds of work experience came before me, etc. if i get this job it'll be great, on top of the interview and hiring process being totally no-pressure i'm sooo glad it seems like a super relaxed workplace. it was just like talking to all my laid-back teachers at my japanese school.

can't respond to your guys' comments until later tomorrow, sorry.

got an email (less than 24 hours later!) saying they had actually finished the interview season but would interview me the next day anyway and to please call. i called, got an interview for tomorrow at 11. the lady i talked to was super nice, casual and normal-american-sounding on the phone, but it's her boss who'll see me for the interview >.> i don't even know if the interview will be in japanese or english but i'm assuming english because it's a job for teaching english and they seem to be preferring to speak/write to me in english so far...

skipped school in order to go suit shopping; eventually got a mostly-linen (= summer) suit, bag, socks, shoes, shirt, undershirt, tie etc for 21,000 yen (like $200), only problem so far is the shoes are slightly too big and eat into my heels so i stuffed some cloth into the toes and hope that will help (i'll just change into the shoes right before we reach the place, and indoors i'll be wearing guest slippers anyway).

googled as hard as i could and it's undetermined whether or not a kindergarten is either going to expect you to wear a suit or laugh at you for wearing a suit, so i'm going in a semi-casual suit, meaning a patterned shirt, no tie, and no creases in my trousers. bringing everything that they could possibly want with me, including my school transcripts, a manga in swedish (that i tend to show kids), thank-you letters from elementary schools, a doctor's note with my eyesight, etc. this job is the best out of the 5 i applied to - relatively nice working hours, near to where i live now, they seem relatively casual (no super-formal language), they give you a "housing allowance" if you move to help pay for your initial moving costs (dunno if i'd qualify for that).

there's a LOT of conflicting info on what KIND of suit to get. basically speaking any suit that fits is fine (no special style needed) BUT the argument is about colors: most people claim you need a black suit, black shoes, black tie and black bag. other people claim any dark color suit is fine and don't mention bags etc.

• buy a new suit; if possible go to the secondhand store (out in the completely opposite direction) and get dress shoes + undershirts. also have to research what KIND of suit (shape, etc) is best...

• finish the thing i'm writing on japanese grammar and publish it on lulu

felt so tired in the past few days, and i've also had dry eyes, despite that i haven't eaten anything bad. i think this is just a combo of the really bright summer sun and me needing my medicine; i looked up the hospital stuff, double-checked that they should speak english and that it's for the right thing, and will go there tomorrow after class.

applied to 5 english-teaching jobs in tohoku and hokkaido tonight; avoided 1 job that obviously sounded really bad (lo and behold, when i googled for reviews of it later it was nicknamed "the mcdonald's of english schools). the jobs at kindergartens, pre-schools and daycares definitely sound the best - sure kids are brats and it's hard to "teach" people so young, but unlike in the big companies, the teachers aren't expecting you to be super formal, they know you need breaks, etc. the pay's the same, and i'll actually get to use japanese during class / at school.

i applied to one place right by my house and messed up when i wrote the freaking email - i said "i saw you were hiring in july" instead of "in april", which i'm sure is going to confuse them and/or make them think i'm really stupid. i'm pretty sure this is the same place that offered me an interview a few months ago but it got lost in my spam folder so i never saw it, and when i replied a month late they never responded. so these guys, if they remember me, have a reaaaaaaaaally bad impression of me... but if i were to be hired there that'd be the best, i could basically just move two neighbourhoods over.

applied for one place in fukushima which is probably near where the tsunami happened. i'm not happy about it but another tsunami is very unlikely to happen so soon and i can just switch jobs after a year or two.

anyway, i don't really feel nervous about emailing and asking about jobs in japanese... i've met so many japanese people by now that i sort of know who's behind the computer, if you know what i mean. but i still feel bad about making stupid mistakes.

check it out! we were walking downtown hoping there was a festival of some sort and came across this. the lyrics of the second song are entirely about Sendai (like, Sendai foods and things) so i might try to translate them later - i'll wait a few days to see if youtube does automatic captioning first.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-gnHzoWNHc

also after waiting literally months to buy harada's "Color Recipe" because they stopped selling it in like december since she was editing it and going to release an updated version, i finally got to buy the updated version today! haven't opened it yet but i'm excited to see what was "improved". the cover was actually made worse. i've read the first volume a billion times but haven't read anything from the second, which goes on sale on the first of next month. seems like the lady who draws "twittering birds never fly" just released some new manga volume too, i dunno if i still like her works or not so i didn't buy it and i'll just wait for it to appear secondhand somewhere...

my wife's TOEIC (english test for foreigners) test is tomorrow so we did some reading aloud practice together. she has swedish consonants, sometimes wrong intonation in individual vocabulary words (like "i addressed the audience" versus "write your address", which at times I'm not actually sure if she's wrong, if it's my dialect or if I've forgotten how that word is actually said. And when she remembers to correctly say z instead of s tends to draw out the z sound too long. Overall though her accent just makes her sound like she constantly has a cold, and this test is just trying to prove that you have English competence enough for daily life / daily work life, nothing near the actual native-level fluency she does have.

i finished completely rewriting that BA thesis proposal from scratch (didn't even look at the old version while writing it) in 2-3 days and turned it in this morning, so whether it passes or not i'm pretty much free from that class now. my classmate also failed it, and my other classmate dropped out of the course, so that means at least 3/6 of the students in the class failed the final assignment. great, huh. anyway i finally managed to order my transcripts, will start writing up a japanese CV/resume (and will do it in English too since I'll be applying for jobs that use English) and make a CV on my website as well that I can just link to. my wife said that since with just a bit of practice i can sound like a very "commercial English voice", as in she thinks I could be a voice actor for small-time commercials and stuff in English, I can put up reading samples on my online CV too. I'll also put up stuff like scans of the articles I've written for the Esperanto newsletter, PPTs of presentations I've done for school, and samples of the thank-you letters I got from a few of the japanese elementary schools. my japanese level is, while nowhere near perfect, DEFINITELY good enough to be very impressive right now — i've noticed that shopkeepers, library staff, strangers etc automatically assume i'm fluent in japanese now and even speak with 100% normal super-formal shop language and all that as if they were speaking to a japanese person. in general right now i feel like i'll get a full-time job super fast after i apply to some, it feels like my chances are reaaaally high.

i've also decided to quit eating cheese (yeah... i was eating it for a while...) because while it doesn't make me physically sick, i still have a better mood when i'm not eating it. also found out my estonian classmate who's been going to a ton of job interviews with no success, actually she hasn't been going to INTERVIEWS - she's been going to stuff like "group info sessions" and "ice-breaking sessions" and "job fairs". no, you've gotta apply to a job directly, search on job hunting websites directly, email companies directly.

sorry for spamming you all with me posting like 5 times a day, but i just found out i do in fact have a 2-year degree!!

there's no "certificate", it just says it in tiny, unclear words at the bottom of my grade transcript. so i ordered two transcripts and asked them to "make it super clear that that is in fact a 2-year degree, if possible". also just emailed to ask for an official transcript from my swedish school that "includes the credits from my exchange school, if possible".

i'm safe guys. i'll get a job. don't have to care one bit about this final assignment for the swedish school anymore (though of course i'll still TRY to pass... i'm not gonna care). just gotta wait two weeks or so for these transcripts to come in, assuming the americans don't mess up the order due to my foreign debit card.

as most of you know, i'm into learning languages, and particularly into trying out any method that might possibly make me learn them better or faster. for a few years now my theory has been that in order to make your mind as "flexible" as possible when it comes to language, you should learn in this manner:

become decent at esperanto —> a pidgin language —> a creole language —> learn a normal language

for example:
1. esperanto, 2. chinook jargon or toki pona, 3. indonesian, 4. japanese or icelandic or russian

( Read more... )

anyway, i read online that you can get to "business level" (as in, understand everything at work, in the news etc) in indonesian in 3 months; and by studying just 30 minutes a day you can get to conversational level (=90% of all normal stuff but not news or business meetings) in one month. if you live in indonesia. also read that no matter where you go in asia, if you know indonesian it looks really good on your CV since everyone does business or tourism with indonesia / malaysia. i had some idea of the first part but no idea about the last part - i guess learning indonesian will help me get jobs in japan.

two years ago is when i last looked at indonesian, attacking fanfic with a dictionary and making a word frequency list; i ended up learning rather a lot of common-use (in fanfic) words, but couldn't find any proper grammar explanations anywhere - the ones i found contradicted themselves or their own example words, etc. the indonesian-english dictionaries were also unusably bad. now i'm good enough at japanese to where i can use japanese materials for learning (which aren't that great but are better than the english ones anyway), and an exchange student (though we have no classes together) speaks at least some malaysian so i can ask him for help. the other cool thing is, i now have a smartphone that has an indonesian language option, so games and stuff will automatically use their indonesian translations.

so!!!! when i feel like it, in my free time, i'll start learning indonesian again. the truth is i want to make a contest out of this and see JUST how fast i can learn it (how far can i get in a month?!) but at this point i'm using japanese 5-7 hours a day (1.5 to 6 at school, then 1-4 hours reading or watching tv at home) and i don't really want to take away from that. i have to think about how much time i really want to "waste" on it...

so ever since i got to japan and saw all those shelves for it in the bookstores i've been wanting to buy BL novels but've been too scared to do it (plus i was thinking my japanese was too bad to read them, or that my eyes were). finally after what, seven months of living here? i did it.

yesterday when there was a sale at the secondhand bookstore i bought a random BL novel (summary: some guy ends up crossdressing because the guy he likes said he looked good in it when they were all drunk at a company party one time), sat down with my erasable highlighter, and read 100 pages straight! i read for like three hours or more! i didn't look up any words or grammar, i just highlighted the ones i didn't know or was iffy on. this is the first time i've done that with japanese (with a novel - i've done it with manga).

while i hadn't peeked at the insides before buying, i did read the summary - from what little i glanced at it seems like stories about office-workers normally use a ton of kanji, so when that was the case i couldn't even make sense of the summary, but this one seemed readable. after i'd been reading for a while i noticed they're actually a pretty good writer, as in even if they have cliché plotpoints they're really into the "showing, not telling" bit and also their characters MISREMEMBER stuff etc - like, at first the character thinks "oh great he's just drunk we shouldn't do this while he's drunk i'm gonna run away" and then a month later they're like "oh he was super grossed out i have to avoid him" (=misremembering). and while you the reader can easily assume the other character is lying at this point or whatever, it's all halfway told from the main character's standpoint and HE doesn't know so it doesn't actually get said in the narration or anything either. all in all it's been a pretty refreshing read, considering i've now spent years reading random crap in english that has a totally different writing style/focus, and while it's the "same but not the same" as BL manga so it's refreshing in that way too.

i think i can finish this book today, and after that i'll plan on just grabbing random BL novels from the 100 yen section and reading them constantly... i'm also checking out the Fight Club novel from the library (who knew THAT was translated to japanese!) and have a devilman novel and cyber city OEDO 808 novel. but somehow i think those are harder than these BL novels.

So I Emailed the last American community college I ever went to (I should have *all* my credits in the system there, if memory serves and depending on how long they keep students' info...). First I Emailed the "info@schoolname" Email which is what I found on their website on the "degree info page". That person told me to instead Email "evaluations@schoolname" because they supposedly dealt with the degrees. THAT person told me to instead Email "advising@schoolname"! And each time is taking a day for anyone to get back to me, because the time difference makes it so I'm getting replies at like 2 in the morning here.

In Japan and the Nordics, school staff uses this funny thing called a forwarding button and just forwards your Email to the correct person for you with a note saying "Hey so-and-so could you check this out?". Washingtonians apparently still haven't figured out how to use one...

In other news thanks to spending 3-4 days Googling every kind of description I could think of for what in the world my Swedish school maybe wants for this homework, I've now managed to figure out the exact (apparently international, in North America, Europe and like Malaysia anyway — Japan has a totally different system of writing academic texts) rules for how you're supposed to write a BA thesis proposal + abstract for that proposal + the other assignments I'm also supposed to do. The thing is, my school wasn't even calling any of these things by their official or common names, as in the teachers just apparently MADE UP names for all assignments and stages of the assignments, on top of basically not even describing what we we're supposed to write, so that's why my initial Googling hadn't turned up anything at all.

What little they did say however, fits into these international rules of structure that I'm seeing, ignoring that they neglected to mention over half the things you're supposed to include and also neglected to mention everything about the structure and word count of each section. So I've messily assembled all this info into a text file, gonna clean it up today and send it to the two classmates I know who're just as confused as me, then finish the damn assignments (the only thing I actually have left is to summarize/quote/paraphrase previous research and make a works cited).

Anyway yeah. I'll get this homework done on time and thanks to all this Googling I'll probably even pass it. Looking back on my entire Japanese degree, I realize the Swedish degree is actually entirely about teaching yourself. You're supposed to Google for info on how to complete your own homework assignments because the teachers won't just teach you anything. You're only in class for 1.5-3 hours a week, compared to basically every other country where you're in class for 6-12 hours a week, so in 3 years in a Swedish school you get the same amount of speaking and listening practice as 1 year or 1 semester in a Japanese, Taiwanese or American school... You're not told any correct info about prerequisites, nothing at all about how your graduation will be delayed for a year if you study abroad, you're not told that a 2-year degree is even POSSIBLE...

managed to find out that in order to get a 2-year degree at Högskolan Dalarna you need a 7.5 credit “project, or thesis writing” course. upon further inquiry, the 7.5 credit course “Academic Writing” (which some people took in 3rd semester, but not me - as far as i know it just has you write a couple short essays) counts as this course, despite it not saying so. it’s also run by a different teacher than the one i’m having problems with. the swedish spring semester is almost over so i’ll have to wait until autumn to take it, BUT it means my “graduation” (with a 2-year degree) is 100% assured now.

also all those years ago i never officially applied for my AA certificate (=2-year degree, no thesis writing required unless normal english class counts) from my american community college so i’ve emailed them now asking if it’s possible for me to get it despite me not knowing my old student number and everything. i have a feeling they’ll want me to call them so i wrote in advance that i live in japan and calling is difficult… the only problem would be if i missed a course or they’ve changed the requirements so i don’t fulfill them, i mean it’s been like 8 years after all.

EDIT: haha shit, i'm reading about the requirements for the "Associate in Integrated Studies" (they've since changed the names for all the degrees! and made the requirement pages more confusing!) and they've now added the requirement of a "College Strategies" course which I don't have as far as i know; but it also says "to be taken within the first 30 credits of your degree". so what?? sure hope i can still get the certificate...

anyway i have now thoroughly convinced myself that together with the AA certificate and a transcript of all my grades from my swedish school, it counts as the “4-year degree or equivalent” that the immigration guys want as an ideal, and even if the swedish transcript doesn’t count because it's not a "finished degree", the AA still counts as the “2-year degree” which is the legal minimum. so as soon as i get the AA certificate i'll be applying to jobs like mad.

i’ve also (I THINK) finally figured out what the teacher for the troublesome class actually wants me to write. my classmate said for a BA paper they’re basically thinking that students are too stupid to be able to do any kind of original research so you have to instead prove that what you’re doing is NOT original; as in i have to show how my thesis idea is “actually exactly the same line of research as what has already been done” and how it’s not a new idea at all. completely ridiculous, but at least i know what i should write now…

japanese friend said “man, can’t i just adopt you and you get a ‘living with family’ VISA??” but i’m pretty sure you can’t do that so easily, eh? i’m 90% sure he was joking but i’ll research it anyway…

i also mailed in my application for the JLPT today, i'll be taking N1. i'm consistently getting 80-100% on both the grammar and reading worksheets which are specifically aimed at N1 level, you only need around 40% to pass the real test and there's still two months left until the test. my troublesome swedish class ends next month so after that i'll be free to just spend ALL my time using japanese and studying for the test, instead of sitting around too worried to focus on anything. but honestly, now that i've found out all this stuff with the AA and everything, i'm really not worried about failing this current class anymore. it'll be "nice" if i pass it, but getting the AA certificate will be the fastest method.

after a lot more searching i've found out that it IS completely possible to get a work VISA when you only have an AA. as in, japanese lawyers and stuff say an AA fits all the legal requirements, and i also found a thread with more than one person saying they got a work visa with one. i should have one, as in my dad should have a certificate and everything that i got somewhere, but i can't remember if i ever got the actual certificate, so i emailed to ask him if i have one and if so can he scan it...

the next problem is simply finding a job that will hire me with only an AA, because so far most of them require a BA from the beginning. i've made a list of all the ones just requiring "a university degree" (no specifications on what kind) or don't list any requirements, and will apply to them maybe even today after school.

i have to write up my CV (=research what a japanese CV looks like) and buy interview clothes somewhere. i'll also request an official copy of my grades from my swedish school and might need to request a paper from my high school explaining i did go to school for four years in english (or maybe my highschool diploma + AA, both from america, will satisfy that).

apparently slouching is a huuuge "no" and will make you fail job interviews in the first minute so i have to do some like, posture training so i can sit with my back straight (i've never been able to do this, or was never taught to sit properly, whatever). also plan on getting some kind of "business haircut" and dying my hair black, though i dunno if that really helps anything because japanese people seem relatively lenient on hair actually, especially when it comes to foreigners. found a podcast with "stuff to absolutely not do during a japanese interview" so i'll have to listen to it later.

by the way, i didn't go to hanyu's parade and in fact avoided going to town as much as i could... because around 110,000 people came for the parade, and on top of that the day before was the grand opening of some kind of haikyuu!event that brought a whole DIFFERENT type of tourist to town...

but if you wanna see movies or photos or something, they're generally calling it stuff like 羽生結弦選手の祝賀パレード so try just searching "羽生 祝賀パレード".

this and next week are gonna be super-duper stressful. tons of homework and general stuff to do. and to top it off i've been eating more "junk food" (=convenience store sushi + stevia chocolate bars) which isn't gonna help how well i deal with things, but for some reason the stevia chocolate helps me fall asleep when nothing else does *shrugs* i was really irritated for a long while since i couldn't sleep like at all at night, now i sleep fine and actually feel kinda content when i wake up. gonna go to the doctor to get my medicine sorted out maybe next week, after some of this homework is done...

got proof i see badly from the eye doctor... forgot if i wrote about any of it here, the first place i went to refused to see me because the doctor couldn't speak english and talking about a disability requires "very precise words etc". then i specifically found a doctor who speaks english and in fact i used japanese the whole time except when talking to him (he was nearly native-level in english so my japanese was worse than his english). it cost 5,000 yen; it would've cost 13,000 but in japan if your condition is from birth or from a work/school accident it's covered on insurance whereas if it's just random old age shit and whatnot it's not covered. so my visit got covered. also 3,000 of that is him writing the explanation paper about my eyes, which for some reason automatically isn't covered by insurance.

in class i read aloud and translated some stuff from the declaration of human rights; the japanese, taiwanese and chinese students didn't understand the english like at ALL even when i thought it was really easy. so through that i realized, hey, i can actually even work as a translator from english to japanese - and it might be a ton EASIER than from japanese to english! it's just that i'd only do a basic translation/explain that meaning of the english, and then i'd need to get a japanese native to fix it all up. whereas with japanese i have the opposite problem, i need someone to explain the meaning so i can translate it properly.

lately i've been playing an online game called "Toram Online" i think it is, a free phone RPG thing. you can play it in english too. so my wife and i joined the same server and have been playing it for a bit every day, it's pretty good for japanese practice but the english translation is really bad lol. i've also fallen in love with a new manga series called 嫌がってるキミが好き, the more i read it the more i like it AND it's at the perfect vocabulary level for me right now, and it just came out with a new volume a couple days ago; i searched 3 bookstores and couldn't find any volumes so i broke down and bought 2 digital ones (because you get a 100... only 100... yen discount if it's a digital copy).

went cherry-blossom viewing like 5 times. it's fun because each group of people has a totally different way of viewing them and a different place they want to go to. most people actually don't seem to picnic out on the grass, instead they walk around and take photos of the various plants and then go have lunch at a restaurant or something, so we never actually experienced the "drunk office workers on a blanket on the grass" type (though we did have a blanket on the grass type, that was with my school classmates and no drinking involved).

anyway through that i found out that there's a REASON why every japanese person knows a ton of different cherry tree names (they don't say just "cherry tree", they say "such-and-such-city cherry tree" etc). it's because the types are usually wildly different - either in how the flowers are grouped together (looking like a cotton plant or like popcorn, for example) or the branches (a willow tree versus a normal cherry tree) or even color (white versus pink versus green flowers), and finally WHEN they bloom - so if most of the cherry trees have already lost their blossoms, you know x and y types will still be blooming.

Started looking for full-time jobs right when I woke up this morning. Seems like at the very least I'll have to expand my search to outside of Sendai... I found one place that's probably desperate enough to take in foreigners - a horse-racing place in Hokkaido (your only job being basic stablework) that will even give you housing if you need it - but my wife's saying stuff like that is too far-fetched and they won't give a foreigner a work VISA. For some reason English-teaching schools aren't really advertising as hiring, even though they're all supposed to be needing a lot more workers now thanks to the upcoming Olympics. What's hiring is stuff like cashier-work which is totally fine as a part-time job but can't get me a work VISA.

Also remembered about that "work on a Japanese farm for a year!" thing but the first results I found all said you don't get PAID anything, you just get to live + eat there for free as you do volunteer work all year. Which isn't gonna help my situation since I'll still have to end up spending money.

From now on I need to somehow research what kind of translation is good for a translation portfolio to get me hired. I figured I can just do a restaurant menu, some worker's rules or something, that kind of everyday stuff, and then throw in one page of novel translation or something. I definitely DON'T want to translate anything important or difficult at my current level of Japanese, but it looks good on a portfolio anyway. I don't know how *big* your portfolio has to be to get you picked up, or even to what kind of companies you send it in to.

Today I've gotta go to the eye clinic to ask about an eye test that proves I'm disabled, and call the JLPT office to ask them to send me papers so I can register as a disabled person... I'll be grateful if the JLPT guys can speak English because I don't know the words for this stuff and it'll be my first phonecall in Japan...

Backup plan #1, which was to become a research student at some Japanese university, has failed. You can't be a research student anywhere in Japan if you don't already have a Bachelor's degree, supposedly. I'm now Emailing random Japanese schools in bilingual Japanese-English asking if it's possible to become a normal student, transfer my credits and graduate from them, but I'm not holding my breath.

Also some (or all?) unis require you as a foreigner to take an entrance exam "proving you have the basic knowledge needed to study at uni". It's unclear whether this is basic Japanese knowledge or basic knowledge like math and science, either way this exam is only held twice a year and if it's anything OTHER than Japanese or English I'm gonna fail it for sure. So I'm asking about if I can possibly bypass this exam since I'm already currently studying at a Japanese uni aaand I also have almost 5 years worth of university credits, including (if needed) credits in math and science and stuff.

Some schools, like a school in Okinawa, actually don't have this test requirement but on the other hand require that you hand in your admissions application IN PERSON to them! So I'd have to pay to take a trip to Okinawa just to hand in an application that might not even get accepted! Also in general none of these schools really have separate info for foreigners who are already in Japan and people who aren't.

Next plan is to quickly translate a bunch of random crap so I have a "translation portfolio" to apply to jobs with and then start applying for jobs; start looking into language schools that my wife can enroll in; quickly write a ton of short books and self-publish them. but i also have school + studying japanese, my part-time job, and my swedish degree preparation class (which as stated, seems nearly 100% certain it's impossible to pass but i still need to keep trying).

also my english lit class was cancelled today, and so i learned the word 休講 "kyuukou", "cancelled lecture". a guy came into the room and said "ah, it's kyuukou after all!" and people sighed, so i understood what was going on but had never heard the word before (normally they use other words for "cancel" etc but this one is specific to "cancelled lecture"...). i also learned that outside on the wall near the school's office is where the teacher will post up papers saying if the lecture is cancelled or not, so i hopefully won't have to waste so much time next time...