so still feeling like crap i went to school today, but no one had told me that morning class was cancelled so i had like 3 hours of waiting at the school until my next (and final) class. in the morning i had replied to that teacher's email. her email had said "are you okay? it'd be good if you got better before the JLPT on sunday." i don't even know why she's sending me this email, no other teachers sent me anything.

i replied "i'm sick, i went to the doctor and it will heal with medicine but i'm waiting for test results and things so i probably won't get medicine until thursday or friday, it affects my whole body a lot but i'll try to come to school starting from today. even if i AM in good health for the test, it's a very long test in a very bright room. at any rate i'll be aiming to pass it". i explained all this only because i already knew she thinks i'm lying about being sick. keep in mind i only actually skipped 2 days of class.

so i'm sitting in the break room with my wife, Angry Teacher walks past the room (which has its door open) and goes into the next room (secretary's office) and starts complaining to the secretary ABOUT ME! naturally i couldn't hear all of it but what i did hear was my first name quite a few times, and "...said he's sick but he's sitting in the classroom right now" and "...that's awful, don't you think?" in that tone of voice she uses when she thinks someone is doing sometihng horrifically unjust to her and she wants everyone else to agree with her.

then after a few minutes, she comes into the doorway of where i am (doesn't enter). "hello", she says quietly, "hello" me and my wife say. "how's your status?" as if she doesn't actually care. "i'm pretty bad" i reply. "so (i read from your email that) you went to the doctor and had some kind of test? you didn't get any medicine?" "no" "you didn't get any other medicine?" "exactly as i wrote in the email, i have to wait for test results before i can get medicine and i'll get medicine on friday or so." she didn't seem to believe me that i had any test results that needed a few days, or on that i didn't get any medicine - no idea why. i certainly didn't tell her that getting this medicine actually needed like 5 weeks of tests and the end of this week will get me to the final round. "okay. it'd be good if you got better before the JLPT on sunday.", sort of as if you get better after you've taken medicine for a single day. then she walked away without even saying "bye" or even attempting to talk to my wife, which is apparently a habit of hers.

my wife pointed out that this teacher said NONE of the standard, sympathetic stock phrases japanese people say all the time in this kind of situation - y'know, "don't push yourself" (無理しないで), "take it easy" (楽にしてね), "your health's more important than school", etc. neither her email nor her actual words sounded like she actually gives a crap about me but she still pretends to care about me. it's just frustrating. if you don't care then just leave me alone, don't come talk to me face to face after every little thing that happens, doubt everything i say, and not listen to me OR my wife.

in "english-american literature class" the teacher brought in a halloween dracula cape + hat that he put on briefly and invited us to try on (after class), and we watched a bit of Nosferatu, some 1950's dracula adaption and the 1990's interview with a vampire movie. i felt AWFUL, my stomach was hurting and i was getting hot flashes and feeling like i would throw up and stuff but it was still a really fun class.

when i was going home, for the first time i met a swede by total chance on the subway. it was a mom with her little kid. i was already standing next to them so when the mom moved to put the kid on her lap, i asked "går det bra att sitta här" - "is it possible to sit here / can i sit here" in swedish, but i think she didn't hear me properly and thought i was speaking japanese or something because she got this confused look on her face and didn't say anything. so i just sat down anyway and listened to her Extremely Standard Swedish.

then on the way home i rented the interview with a vampire movie, along with the new gintama live-action movie and a few episodes of jojo. got a bunch more hotflashes, bought sushi and some other stuff at the grocery store and made it home. i really, really don't want to go to school what with how sick i've been feeling but i also don't want to skip school so...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

okay, so my wife pointed out some stuff i forgot.

1. almost every single store that people said online was "huge", was actually smaller than sendai versions, or the same size.

2. sendai book-off has 100-yen books; at tokyo book-off the lowest price was 200 yen.

3. a certain secondhand shop chain sells stuff at like 300-500 yen in sendai; in tokyo 800 was the minimum. so like, accessories no matter how small were still 800 yen.

4. went to a 3-floor daiso in tokyo marked as a "huge daiso" and they didn't even sell hats or sun visors like every single 100 yen shop in sendai does.

5. basically saw no JAPANESE food advertised anywhere, except ramen and occasionally curry. no japanese-style restaurants. no sakura-flavored stuff. no japanese-style sweet shops. no baked sweet potato. that was part of the whole "tokyo doesn't even feel japanese" feeling we got overall. we only saw like one yakitori shop, which are eeeverywhere in sendai, and izakaya/bars were few compared to sendai too (you can buy traditional japanese food at japanese bars, more or less).

6. the manga they sold in the chain shops and book-off were different. in sendai, advertised everywhere is series relating to northern japan (ex. ainu stuff, blue giant supreme and wake up girls which take place in sendai, jojo's bizarre adventures which was written by a person from sendai). in tokyo it was totally generic stuff that didn't look interesting one bit (i spent like 4 hours look at EVERYTHING in the bookstores so i know!) and also they didn't really have those series that are everywhere in sendai.

so if you do ever go travelling around japan, it might be worth it to pop into some bookstores just to see the differences between regions.

here's most of my photos from tokyo, my new phone takes really shitty-looking photos unfortunately. we didn't take many because there was nothing to take photos of! just generic buildings.

the night bus building in sendai + the bus itself:







arrived in shibuya, this was what we saw after walking for a little bit


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holy hell i've now met the demon that is "japanese paperwork".

we went to the bank with the guys we're teaching english to, got bank accounts. we had to write our full address, full names and birthdates 3 times, plus pronunciation guide for our names twice and our address once. our address is REALLY REALLY LONG, and my wife again had the problem where her name, thanks to her two middle names, was too long for their system. all we needed was our "hanko" (name-stamp), "zairyuu card" (residence card, aka proof we're not illegal aliens), and health insurance card. no passport or anything else. we sat in a sort of break room and were even given tea. the bad part is, the bank doesn't allow anyone else to fill out the paperwork for you - if our friends had been allowed to, it'd've taken less than half the time.

we each got a "cash card", which is actually just a debit card but isn't called debit for some reason, and a bank book. when you deposit money via an ATM, you insert your bank book and it prints a line with the date and how much you have in your account and stuff. i also know why most japanese people have huge wallets now - it's so you can keep your bank book in your wallet. you need your bank book as proof of your identity if you go to the bank or something weird like that, at any rate we were told it's very important.

we weren't told anything about interest rates (my japanese friend assures me they're amazingly low) or monthly fees. instead you get a fee if you try to use an ATM outside of business hours — which are from like 9am to 3-6pm — meaning you CAN use an ATM at 2am but you'll get a service charge. there's also a service charge if you use an ATM from or send money to an account not from your same bank. in general if you're paying a bill sent to you in the mail (ex. our rent bill) and you pay it with cash there's also service charges at that time, so it just seems like they always want to charge like 600 yen for sending anyone money. we weren't taught how to use our cards or anything but our friends showed us a little bit and will show us more later. we put 1,000 yen as starter money on our cards. we even got a cup of lukewarm green tea. the bank took TWO HOURS.

then with our brand-spanking new cards we went to the phone shop, which was the demon. we got two brand-new phones (15,500 yen each) + the cheapest possible SIM card plan (1,650 a month for 3gigs of data; calls are 40 yen a minute); there was an initial cost of 3,000 yen per SIM card but actually it was a special sale day so we got that for free. our phones can, by the way, be set to english or japanese. now, how long do you think it took us? FOUR HOURS.

we chose our phones and SIM card plans. first we filled out some paperwork, with our friends' help. then we filled out more paperwork which was more or less exactly the same, it's hazy at this point. then we were forced to call the customer help center, who had two japanese to english translators (from india) on-hand, so a japanese staff member read from a piece of paper in japanese, we got the same paper in english, so did the translation staff. the japanese member read in japanese, the translation staff translated and/or read in english exactly what was on our paper, we had to mark checkboxes saying that "yes we were in fact given this information"... which was almost entirely information that we'd already gotten from our actual in-store staff member. i mean, they did stuff like confirm which phone and which plan we're getting, even confirm our payment method. dude just let us talk to the in-store lady, okay?? because she already confirmed it herself!

so after that the lady just kept kinda sorting out paperwork, she also had to scan our residence card, health insurance card and bank cards individually. then had to link our bank cards to our phone number via a special machine, so we'd be able to pay our phone bill each month (which comes on the 26th of the month btw). had to open the phone box to show us that everything was in fact there safe and sound (japan likes doing this). then had to put in the SIM cards for us, which took like 20 minutes. etc. we even protested at the whole help center thing, saying that since we can read english it'd go way faster to just read the paper ourselves, but no. four hours.

and none of our classmates who complain about japan have had to go through this. they had magical phones that could take japanese SIM cards no problem, and they're "rich" (compared to us) so used more expensive plans etc, so their in-out time was like 20 minutes. but the good thing is, if we keep using the same company but just need a new phone or new SIM card it's gonna go a lot faster next time. and it's not like you get a new phone once a month or something like that...

...anyway, now we have phones, meaning: google maps! LINE! actually being able to call in emergencies! we can travel to new cities without the fear of getting lost! we can make membership cards at the grocery store, manga rental shop, etc!

and we have bank accounts, meaning: applying for jobs will be easier! i can now order off Rakuten, which is cheaper and more interesting than Amazon!

it feels like we're really deep into japanese society now - after not having had these two things for six months. almost like we're real citizens. teehee.

so, three days ago i was given じゅんさい (an edible lake-plant) by one student, then two days ago i got a "souvenir" hand towel + bath salt set from another student (since they didn't say where it was from i think they got this set from someone else and didn't want it, but they said it's good to have a lot of hand-towels around because you'll be sweating buckets during the japanese summer).



so yesterday i tried making a sort of pumpkin bread with dates in it to give them as a return present.

recipe:
1. rice flour, oat flour, rye flour; mix with water until a really dry dough and let sit.
2. cooked pumpkin, cinamon, tumeric (i used the pressure cooker for 15 minutes). use the water as a drink, save the pumpkin "meat" for the recipe. i think i used "mexican pumpkin".
3. combine the above stuff and stir with chopsticks until the batter becomes super-smooth. add 2 eggs, some baking powder, some salt. it should now be fairly runny batter. make a thin pancake (a bit thicker than a crepe) with it. after the pancake's cooked a little but still isn't completely cooked, press some chopped dates into the top.

i thought it was pretty bland - the pumpkin taste was almost nonexistant, i'd accidentally bought the wrong kind of dates so they weren't very sweet (btw japanese people know the japanese word "jujube" but not "dates") etc. but the 2 students i gave it to liked it and then as thanks they took us to the grocery store and bought soup ingredients for us! 2,000 yen worth of food to make soup!



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i always forget the real name for these (zouri?) but anyway, i bought some tatami shoes with rubber soles (=1,900 yen) a while ago and this week it's gotten to 17°C and i've finally been able to wear them outside the house. i thought people'd be staring, but the more time i spend here the more i realize traditional clothes aren't actually as rare as it seems (and i suspect they're more common the further away you get from the city), so i decided to try it.

end result is, most people don't give you a second glance. people stare a LOT LOT more by me simply having my white cane out or by me speaking english (btw they stare more when we speak english than swedish i think, but most japanese people can't tell the difference between english and swedish either so maybe it's just my imagination). my wife said that at just a glance you probably can't tell that these are tatami shoes and not just normal sandals, and that based on what someone told her yesterday japanese people don't seem to realize that japanese traditional shoes/socks aren't actually international (i guess because flip-flops exist they think of them as exactly the same thing?).

also i'd barely been able to sleep for the past few days, i think it's unconscious stress from being a few months late on my medicine or something, though after i ate some pineapple i got sleepy so it could be a deficiency on top of that. anyway i found the one clinic in sendai for my thing which supposedly has english-speaking doctors and know exactly how to get there now, but their WEBSITE has zero info about or in english and there's no email. i'm asking if i can get the SIM cards with a classmate who's done it for herself before today, and then i can try calling the clinic to make an appointment. it'll be my first call in japanese and i definitely don't know all the vocabulary so i'll have to research/study a bit first...

at esperanto club yesterday we got to hear about rationing during WWII from the oldest lady there (she's like 90) who lived through it (the others are like 60-70). apparently NO ONE had rice except in very certain areas/super rich people, and instead of flour or rice they mixed in something that started with an s and i'll have to figure out what it was later (she said it tasted bad). her dad worked in tokyo but was never home and half his time was spent waiting in line for rations in tokyo. once he tried to trade off some of the family's old kimono for bags of rice so he could bring some home, but the train stations were full of policemen who checked everyone's bags for stuff like that so he got caught (i think) and anyway in the end the family never got any rice.

also they closed most of the shops like cafés and stuff, but according to this lady it wasn't actually because enough people couldn't afford to go there, it was because at the shops they would do illegal "free trading" of items for food (like the kimono to rice).

we brought the 2 kimono + 1 kimono jacket to club to show them, and one of the ladies who's a kimono-otaku knew what everything was and got excited. apparently we bought stuff that was supposed to be at least 30,000 yen total for only 3,000 yen. our kimono jacket is actually from okinawa, our green kimono's for autumn/early winter (basically because it's not fully lined) and the blue one is for winter (fully lined). the jacket has a missing tie-string and stuff and she just immediately said that she'll bring one for us. her and the WWII lady also taught us how to fold away the kimono, and when the younger one commented "oh you really know how to do this!" the older said "of course i do! how many times do you think my mom beat it into my head how to fold kimono??". we ate huge rice balls with salmon inside that the younger one made for us, and read another japanese children's book while translating it to esperanto.

we also found out that a prominent member of the local esperanto scene (73 years old) got hit by a car about a week ago and has been in the hospital in a coma ever since. i didn't completely understand what they were saying but i managed to look it up in the news later after i searched around and found out how to write his name in kanji.

that same day was "Girl's Day", basically you eat candy and put some traditional dolls on display and if you're a little girl you apparently can get stuff like balloon animals given to you for free. we couldn't find any candy that didn't have sugar in it although it was SUPPOSED to be 100% rice meal - but we went to a free super-tiny museum exhibit that had the dolls, some other handicrafts, and then random posters about sendai dialect. then we wandered around a bit and found a bookstore with a used bookstore on the upper storey.

i borrowed the esperanto version of the manga i need for my BA paper from club, and just bought the japanese version online. the esperanto version, which i thought was the 1st volume because it's the only one there is and doesn't have a number on the cover, uses the cover of the 6th volume and is actually the 2nd volume. so i accidentally ordered the wrong volume on amazon but noticed and canceled it an hour or half an hour later and cancelling went without a problem. now to buy the e-book of the english version and start my BA research...

finally did half the dishes. i threw out a bunch of stuff that i continuously don't want to clean, like the fish grill, an extra cup, a teapot (don't worry, it's all cheap stuff!). the more dishes we own the less i want to clean them; i said when i moved here i only wanted to have ONE of everything per person so that dishes would always seem managable, but for various reasons it didn't end up like that.

the sink-drain-cover thing here is really bad - so, in most countries (including sweden and japan) there's no such thing as a garbage disposal and you need to just like, not toss stuff down the drain, and then you have to clean out your drain-pipes once a year or so. in order to not have to clean them at all, you get a wire mesh basket thing (just like a metal strainer) that sits in your drain and catches all the gunk. the problem is the one that came with our apartment is IMPOSSIBLE to clean!! it's hard to clean a normal mesh, but the holes in this one are so tiny that all the food bits just get smashed into it when you try to rub at it with a sponge. i have no idea how japanese people clean them, i tried to google it and couldn't find anyone who had the same type as ours.

i burnt some stuff when using our pressure cooker and this time it just won't come out. i tried the baking soda + vinegar thing and it didn't work, so i either did it wrong or have to find another way... it doesn't seem to be affecting the taste of the food but just seeing that black stuff in there is really annoying.

our washing machine lid broke - it was broken when we moved in, but now it's broken to the point where you can't actually close the lid anymore. if you use the apartment complex's machines it costs 200 yen to wash, then 100 yen for 30 minutes in the dryer (an average load of clothes isn't dry even after 90 minutes, so on bad-weather days i break the load up into thirds and dry each third separately for 30 minutes then hang them up indoors to dry the rest of the way). i have no idea if using our own machine costs the same amount or not.

aaand my wife's been having freakouts and stuff as usual. first she gets super angry/upset when we're at the grocery store, and usually she wants to eat some kind of junk food (in today's case, mayonnaise-tuna onigiri from the convenience store). then later i'm waiting for her to finish using the computer or i'm sleeping or something and then i come out of the bedroom to find her crouched over on the floor in the kitchen sobbing. so i try to ask what's wrong and she doesn't say anything. an hour passes and she eventually moves to the bed, covering herself with the blankets but usually still crying. i keep trying to ask what's wrong and she still doesn't say anything. a couple hours pass like this and she falls asleep. the whole time not saying anything.

this happens pretty much every time after she eats junk food. if not a few hours after than a day or two after. the "junk food" can be onigiri, yoghurt, sushi, etc and i believe also from butter which she doesn't want to stop eating - basically she has some kind of reaction to the preservatives or sweetening agents in the food, and in the case of butter i think it's just because it's pasteurized. and based on my own experiences i think it gets worse 1. the more you have at once (ex. two onigiri, not just one) and 2. the more often you have them (1 onigiri per day but 3 days in a row).

i also have reactions to the food but in my case i get irritated... AND my reactions aren't as severe as hers, probably because i eat a lot more fermented foods and "healthy" foods in general than her (ex. i eat a lot of chicken-bone broth and then mix in some miso to it, or i'm eating squid guts or something - she's basically only eating mincemeat, butter, onions and sweet potatoes. no fermented stuff)

anyway i'm just like... ugh... i don't want to "waste" my vacation staying indoors every day and not going out except to go to the grocery store. which is what we've been doing for the most part. i'm gonna see if we can at least go to the zoo or something... i have one classmate who said she'd help me figure out how to get a SIM card at this one shop so i guess i should contact her and do that soon, otherwise we'll never be able to take a real vacation to like osaka or something...

got a book from the library about mistakes people make when writing kanji - i've only read one entry so far (about 達) but it seems really good. it explained that people usually mistake how many lines to draw (3) at the bottom of 達 and so accidentally draw 幸 (2) instead, but 達 was originally made up of 大 with 羊 underneath ("big + sheep"), not the modern　土羊 ("dirt + sheep"); owning sheep being a symbol of prosperity in China at the time. by the way, the dot to the upper-right of 犬 is supposed to be the dog's EAR (and that part of the kanji is called the "right-shoulder"), not it's TAIL as i had learnt...

i saw a booklet of local apartments that are specifically catering to students, and there are some super cheap ones in there - 20,000 yen a month, being one room + a kitchen and bathroom! currently i have 2 rooms and pay 30,000 a month (+ 10,000 in utilities). a lot of them also have tatami floors which are difficult to clean, but you can buy floor coverings at the 100 yen shops so you don't have to worry about spilling stuff and then smashing it into the tatami on accident. my wife's worry, she says, isn't about how small they are but how thin the walls are, and she assumes all cheap japanese apartments will have super-thin walls. i don't think that's necessarily true, but even so there might be apartment-hunting tips that say how you can figure that out. anyway, finding apartments when we need to seems like it'll be super easy so i'm not worried about that.

ton of stuff happened yesterday!!

1. went to esperanto club; next meeting (in march) is "hina no matsuri", aka "doll-collection showing day" and 4 out of 6 of us will wear kimono! we don't have our own belts and things but the one lady who does tea ceremony says she'll bring them for us.

2. with the same club members we're going to some (old) person's house to have a flower-viewing (hanami) party!

3. on the escalators in sendai station (big train/bus station that doubles as a huge shopping mall) some random older guy asked me about my bag -- but he stopped talking when i misheard one of his questions (he said "where are you from, germany?" after i said i bought the bag in germany, but i misheard it as "where in germany did you buy the bag?")

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a letter i got from a kid whose class i visited



a "sorry but we're not hiring right now" email i got just like yesterday, from an english school:



my student loan is FINALLY coming in now, after waiting for like 3 months for it to get sorted out. thanks to it being a few back-payments, the first payment (which hopefully will come next week as long as my bank has its shit sorted) is going to equal like $6,000 USD; with that i'll be able to pay rent until september, and then since i'll still be getting some money each month i'll be able to actually go on trips and stuff:



this is a sample of some of the stuff at the secondhand shop "hard-off". they've got kimono, yukata, geta, all manner of traditional plates and statues, tons of videogames (super cheap) and DVDs (usually not cheap). i saw a 3DS for just 1,000 yen. if you want anything just let me know!!:

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soo my wife picked up some random 100 yen BL volumes at the used bookshop today because the cover looked funny. turns out, the main character comes from the prefecture directly on top of ours (as in, i have friends from there!!) and speaks in dialect randomly throughout the first volume. northern dialects hardly ever appear in manga and i've been wanting to train my understanding of them, so it was a nice surprize.

i then read the 2 volumes of it that she'd bought, and while there were almost no words i didn't know, i read so slowly in small print that it took... oh... probably 5 hours. SIGH.

went around town and to some different shops today; despite being valentine's day we saw basically NOTHING advertising it (only "some" chocolate and "some" alcohol), and only saw like two couples on dates / dressed up for dates. kinda disappointing because i thought there'd at least be fancy cakes or displays in town or something. in anime/manga you always see the "here's some chocolate i made/bought myself!!" deal but apparently valentine's day is literally nothing more than that. also that "i made myself" actually just means melting pre-bought chocolate into a mold that you like, you're not actually mixing cocoa powder or anything (and the darkest chocolate i saw was only like 50%!!). i'm also currently on the hunt for eel, because i've seen eel in holiday sushi and eel with sauce on it (that i can't eat since it has sugar), but no PLAIN eel that i can just cook myself. despite, y'know, being an anime staple food. maybe they get common in summer?

anyway, if it's a "normal" manga (shounen, BL, shoujo, action) then there's now so few words/phrases i don't know it's just the same as reading a scanlation in english to me. political manga/anime i still don't get. i haven't been looking up words i don't know, instead i've just "kept reading" and frankly even though you can learn them from immersion you sure learn them a lot more slowly than if you just looked them up (at the point where i'm at anyway)... probably after one more year in japan i'll be able to say i'm "fluent" at japanese, or so i hope...

300 yen in subway stops away from my house is a big secondhand shop chain called "hard-off" (as well as "off-house, garage-off...") which we just went to for the first time yesterday. it has a crap-ton of super freaking cheap stuff, and a few more expensive things. you can for example get 100-yen gameboy games, a 1,000-yen 3DS, 800-yen kimono, 500-yen tabi shoes (ninja/festival shoes). the more expensive stuff is things like 8,000-yen kimono belts, 12,000-yen "new 3DS LL" which just came out, ipads and so on.

we got a few gameboy games, 2 yukata, 1 kimono, 1 kimono jacket, a ceramic bowl with a plastic lid that very hopefully can hold soup (for my lunch) without spilling, my wife got a few shirts. i've been looking all over for shirts that have japanese on them and there's none anywhere, unless you're looking at anime fandom shirts (and most of those are for crappy modern series with pictures of badly-drawn anime girls), and there weren't any at this shop either. looked for irons, blenders and a few other things but didn't see any. they didn't have so much men's stuff in general either.

then we went to a big Daiso (100-yen shop), and they had more traditional stuff there than in the other ones we've been in so far. there was also 2-3 traditional japanese restaurants on the same street, and entering the grocery store ALL the pre-made meals and everything were really traditional (and there were hardly any sweets), so i guess the people there like traditional stuff. anyway if you ever go to japan and want souvenirs, or want a "japanese house", definitely just go to hard-off and house-off because there's a ton of stuff like real, good-quality traditional cups and plates that cost only like 800 yen.

all in all we spent about $100 USD there including the subway costs, the 100 yen shop and buying groceries. i think we have just about enough money to pay the bills this month but no matter what we do next month we'll need to borrow money if my student loan still isn't sorted out (they've now completely misread that the school only registered me as an exchange student in autumn and not also in spring, otherwise everything SHOULD be fine) so i figured why not...

this trip was 5,000 yen for me, 20,000 for my wife since she's not a student at my school. long story short my end opinion is "it was boring as hell" but i still did SOME fun stuff. it felt more like 20, 30% fun, 50% riding in the stupid bus and trying not to fall asleep or get blinded from the sunlight, and the rest were various worries like 1. not being able to get any food to eat, 2. someone coming in the hot springs when i'm in there or something; that or boring stuff like listening to a speech in japanese (using a lot of words/terms i don't know and mentioning a lot of famous people/places/events i don't know, while pointing to things i can't see) about how to brew rice wine, and then watching other people taste various types of rice wine.

i "can" drink even though it makes me unable to sleep and i get hot immediately after drinking (i don't get nightmares, i just can't sleep) but even if we're not staying in the same hotel room, if my wife sees me take a sip or know i'm hanging out with people who're drinking, or smells alcohol on me and so on then she freaks out. So of course i can't drink any. and by the way i've already been in a rice wine museum which was a lot cooler and more detailed than this one. so then we're just standing in this cold factory watching 9 of our classmates (and some teachers) try out various kinds of rice wine while ignoring us.

similarly we went to a castle/museum where, as is usual in japanese museums, i couldn't read anything since the font was too small AND it was all boring shit anyway (3 floors of "so-and-so who fought so-and-so" in "such-and-such war"). the teachers had decided ALL the activities and restaurants and our meals without asking any of us what we wanted to do, so for example we all ended up eating at a ramen buffet where 4 out of 12 people in our group could ONLY eat white rice, carrots, oranges and grapefruit. We couldn't even get tea or coffee as that wasn't included with the buffet.

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well, today's esperanto club was fun. it's right around the corner from the "Ahago bashi" subway station, aka either 400 yen by subway + 10 minutes walking from my house, or 20 minutes walking from downtown sendai. it's an old-fashioned tiny 1-room apartment; no stove, the bathroom is JUST a toilet (anyone living here would've had to take baths at the local bathhouse), you have to turn the water on for your room yourself by going outside into the apartment yard, then turn it off when you leave!! although it was barely advertised anywhere compared to all the other holidays i've seen so far, today was "setsubun", the first day of spring (it's x number of days after the new year, or after some other event; anyway it's calculated every year). guys wear demon masks and then kids throw beans at them; traditionally in most places it's roasted soybeans i think but nowadays most people are using peanuts in the shell, because they're easier to clean up. tohoku (where i'm living) and hokkaido used different beans than all the rest of japan apparently, but now they've assimilated. anyway apparently the reason for WHY you're throwing beans is, your "inner demons" get chased out of your house and they're not to come back "until these beans i'm throwing sprout". if you use cooked beans, they'll never sprout, meaning the demons will never come back. ( Read more... )

forgot if i posted it here but since i went on exchange sweden somehow messed up and thinks i've paused/quit my studies and thus have to start paying back my student loan... at a rate of 200-300 USD a month i think it was because they've ALSO somehow missed the fact that i don't have a job (i've only gotten a student loan for one semester so far so my loan's not that big). so i had to message them a couple days ago, and they're being slow to respond.

i also found out that i can continue to go to the same japanese school taking the same classes even after my exchange year, as long as i take the JLPT and/or TOEIC and then pay tuition of about 300 USD a month i think it was. i'd just be classified as a "research student" instead. i'm going to start preparing so that if i can't find a job i can do that instead. the problem there is of course money again: we'll have to move out of our student apartment to a more expensive place at the end of my exchange year, and then i'll be paying tuition on top of that.