Yep, the cherry blossoms are out. It seems to me they’re earlier this year, but a lot of April and May of last year is a blur to me. I had kind of a tough time getting adjusted.

One thing for sure, it’s darker and colder this year. I took some nice sakura pictures on campus on days with bright blue skies this time last year. Recently, we’ve had a few nice days, but generally it’s gray and rainy. The blossoms still look nice, but it’s not the same.

The Japanese have cherry-blossom-viewing parties/picnics every spring and they’re still taking place this year, but I just saw one just the other day where the participants looked more like they were ready to go skiing.

Along with the cherry blossoms, new classes are springing up at the university. The school year here starts in April and last week was the first week of the new semester. I have a new experience to get used to. One of my Oral English classes has 90 students. 90 students! At my former school, the University of California, Riverside Extension Center, 17 students was considered a big class.

The students are now shopping for electives so there’s a possibility that the numbers will go down. There’s also the possibility that they’ll go up. Oh, well. After the first 40 or 50, it doesn’t matter much... at least not until it comes to grading. I usually give a quiz every week. I may have to rethink that. I have about 160 students so far with three classes yet to meet for the first time. We won’t know exactly how many students per class we’ll have for a couple of weeks yet.

I got a little of the gaijin treatment from the big class. After the first lesson, several of the students wanted to have their pictures taken with me. It seems to me that that’s usually reserved for the last class, not the first one. This particular class is for freshmen, ichinensei, so I guess I may be something of a novelty for them. Actually, a lot of people, Japanese or not, say I’m a novelty or words to that effect, but that’s another subject.

We had the graduation ceremony for last year’s seniors, yonensei, a couple of weeks ago. What I’ll remember most about it is all of the girls in kimono (no plurals in Japanese). Very, very colorful. Very, very pretty. Of course, I’ve seen women in kimono before, but not that many at one time. It was very Japanese. Nice experience.

Every once in a while, there’ll be a woman wearing a kimono on the train or walking down the street, but mostly, of course, it’s western-style clothing, although often with a Japanese style to it. The hooker-look of last April is back - short skirts and black stockings - and there’s always the logo/slogan clothes. My new favorite is one that I saw on a young mother with two small children at McDonald’s. Yes, I go to McDonald’s in Japan occasionally, which is weird because I never do when I’m in the U.S. I’ll have to think about that. Anyway, she was wearing a mommy sweatshirt with cute little fuzzy teddy bears all over it. Then she turned around and on the back it said, “Everybody must get stoned.”

So, anyway, I’m now looking forward to a new year of classes, for the most part, and cultural experiences, also for the most part.

I just tried to order an exercise bike from a department store in Tokyo and after filling out all the forms and arranging for delivery, I was informed that the company won’t deliver to the fifth floor. Can’t blame them a bit for that. I don't want to go up to the fifth floor, either.

I had to cancel the order until I can arrange for help in getting the machine up to my apartment. Of course, I could just get my exercise walking up and down the stairs and I wouldn’t need the exercise bike in the first place. The thing is, I've been doing that for a year now and will be doing it for at least another year and I really hate those stairs.

Here’s another picture of a sign telling people to clean up after their dogs. As with many of the unusual types of signs you can see in Japan, there are different versions in different places. The chikan sign from the last post has many different depictions of the bad guy - most of them monster-like.

As for this photo, at least the dog has the decency to be embarrassed over the situation. He’s actually blushing. The one on my earlier post looked like he was enjoying the fact that his master had to follow him around with a plastic bag. Of course, the kid didn’t seem too disturbed by it, either.

So, let’s see...

Well, I just got back from the kerosene and rice shop. That’s a loaded cultural sentence right there, isn’t it?

The first thing is, of course, how do these two things fit together? I not really sure, but there’s a shop up the street and that’s all they sell. The rice is in packages from about five to 20 or more kilos and the kerosene is pumped into about five gallon plastic containers that are supplied by the customer.

The shop keeps kind of strange hours that seemed to be governed by when I need kerosene. That’s when they’re closed. I keep two containers in my apartment, just in case. When I run out of one I still have about three or four days to get it refilled before the other one is used up. That usually works, except when I forget or when they see me coming and put the closed sign on the door. Then I’m back to my electric space heater until I work things out.

When I was living here ten years ago, there was a truck that went around the neighborhoods filling containers that were left at the curb. To give you an idea of the difference between Japan and the U.S., the way you’d pay at that time was to just leave the money in a bag tied around the top of the container. You would come home at night and your change and your kerosene would be waiting at the curb for you. I may be cynical, but I don’t think that would be a wise system in my own country.

I’m not sure if the trucks are still being used elsewhere, but they certainly don’t deliver to the fifth floor here. That fifth floor thing is also why I only get one container at a time. I have to take a breather about floor three on my way back from kerosene shopping. Even my Japanese neighbors realize the difficulty of my situation. I ran into some third floorers on my way up and they kind of laughed and said, “Go-kai da ne.” (Fifth floor, right?)

The next thing I find a little strange is just the popularity of kerosene heaters. I imagine they do a good business selling kerosene at that store because everybody uses the heaters, even the smaller shops.

I have two kerosene heaters - one older one that works well and a newer one that will only work when it’s in the right mood. I couldn’t get either one to work at first, but Yoh-san came over and touched a couple buttons and they both started right up. I’m sure he thinks I’m a bit simple with all the things I can’t seem to do right... or at all. You all probably do, too, come to think of it, but you don’t get to judge me until you try it all for yourselves.

Anyway, in addition to the kerosene heaters, I have two electric space heaters that I use occasionally, but they’re too expensive to run all the time. Then there’s one room that has a combination heater-air conditioner built in. Unfortunately, it’s not in the room set up as an office and not in the bedroom, so it’s not much use to me. Oh, a little side note - to the Japanese, this built-in unit is just an air-conditioner, or ‘air-con’ in Japanese-English speak. What I mean is, in the west we refer to only the cooling unit as an air-conditioner, and the heating part is... a heater. To the Japanese, an air-con both heats and cools. An example of language adaptability - they have taken an English word and shortened it and then modified the meaning.

I should be switching to the cooling part of the air-con soon. It’s still cold and wet today, but they’re predicting the cherry blossoms will be in bloom in the next week or so and hot weather can’t be far behind. I don’t know, though. Last year it was the middle of April before the cherry blossoms came out. I seem to remember using a heavy blanket at night all the way to May.

Wow. That means I’ve been back in Japan for an entire year.

Each one goes faster.

We'll see what this one brings.

I haven’t had a lot to write about lately. It’s a little strange, but true, that what’s unusual becomes common after you live with it for a while. I don’t doubt that anyone visiting me would notice and find interesting a lot of little things that I overlook after seeing them on a daily basis for the last 10 months. Still, there are some things...

The security guards salute me when I arrive at the university in the morning. Makes me feel kind of special. I can imagine them whispering to each other as I walk by, “He’s an English teacher!” I think that’s actually a proper greeting and want to require it at my school when I go back to California. Now if I could just get the students to salute when I come into the classroom.

The picture on this page is pretty cultural. Take a look at it and see if you can figure it out before I tell you its meaning.

It’s actually a six-foot tall warning about flashers, molesters, perverts in general - chikan in Japanese. Somebody told me once that it meant that there had been trouble at the particular places where the signs are posted, but I think it may just be a general warning for certain areas. This sign, for example, is at the entrance to a walking path that goes off through some woods and is rather isolated.

Either way, yow! What can kids be imagining when they see signs like that? You’d think they wouldn’t even dare to come out of their houses. It certainly adds another level to not wanting to go to school. You have to go outside to do that.

Unfortunately, I suppose it’s necessary to educate children about unpleasant things just for their own safety. Still, I’ve never seen the equivalent in the U.S. so it makes me wonder about cultural differences more serious than driving on the left or saluting teachers..

I don’t know how effective the signs actually are, but you can believe you won’t be catching me walking up that path day or night.

Okay, I’ve been meaning to write about trash and recycling since I got here in April. In Japan, even such a standard topic has its cultural twists and turns.

When I lived here 10 years ago, the trash and the recyclables were collected on different days, with all of the recyclables going out together in one bag, presumably to be sorted elsewhere. Every neighborhood had a spot where people just piled their bags of trash on the curb for pickup. After the trucks had come and gone, you’d see a local woman out there sweeping up the street around the collection point.

There was also what the ex-pats called Big Gomi day, gomi being ‘trash’ in Japanese, when everything from bicycles to TVs could be kicked to the curb and carted away. I once saw an electric organ being crushed into a garbage truck that was almost the same size as the organ. REALLY big gomi...

A lot of the time, there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with the stuff. It had just been replaced by newer models. I’ve heard stories of gaijin furnishing their apartments with Big Gomi day finds. I confess to having once rescued a guitar stand from the trash. Oh, yeah. I did grab a discarded bicycle, too, when I had a visitor that needed transportation. That could have actually caused me some trouble because it turns out the owner’s name was painted on the rear fender - like with most bicycles here, I found out - and all bicycles are supposed to be licensed. If I had been stopped by the police, I would have had some ‘splaining to do. Well, not me. My friend was riding it... This naming and licensing of bikes makes their abandonment at the train stations even more difficult to understand.

Anyway, now Big Gomi day seems to be a thing of the past. It’s been replaced by small pickup trucks cruising around with looped recorded messages saying, “Bring out your big gomi” or the equivalent. Very annoying, but I guess efficient enough.

The authorities were then also just starting to eliminate the use of black trash bags and require clear bags so that what was in the bags could be seen. That seemed like a hassle to me, not least of all because I had a new box of black bags and nowhere to use them. I couldn’t have imagined where it was all leading.

My first week back, I couldn’t find a place to leave my trash and it was starting to pile up a bit. I asked Yoh-san what I was missing and he came back with three or four pages of instructions for me on how to sort and send my trash.

First, it depended on which side of the tracks I lived on. We got that worked out and I found the trash storage area for my apartment under the back stairs. Now all I had to do was sort my trash into seven different categories and check the calendar every day to see which type of garbage the trashmen had agreed to receive that day.

The categories are basically burnable and nonburnable. Nonburnable, though, is divided into; recyclable plastic bottles (PET designated, whatever that means); other plastics; recyclable paper; glass; aluminum; batteries, light bulbs and thermometers (!); and miscellaneous such as hair dryers and knives, which are pictured on the printout to avoid confusion. That’s also how I know thermometers go with light bulbs instead of with miscellaneous. There's a picture of a thermometer in that category. Do NOT put the plastic bottle caps in with the plastic bottles, oh no, because they’re made from a different kind of plastic and, so, go with ‘other plastics’.

The paper needs to be tied into bundles and the rest has to be separated into two separate kinds of bags - clear bags for everything except burnable trash which is put into semi-clear bags. Why, you may ask? Haven’t the slightest idea, I would reply. I have a theory, but only a theory, that you can put trash into semi-clear bags because that’s the kind that you get from the supermarkets and it gives those bags an aftermarket use, if you’ll forgive the pun.

What would happen if you put burnable trash in a clear bag, I dare not think.

Of course, this necessitates a trip to the store to buy packages of the proper bags which cannot be distinguished between just by looking at the packages they come in. It requires some knowledge of kanji, of which I have little, and/or questions in Japanese, in which I can’t seem to make the problem understood, so I now have three packages of semi-clear bags, which I don’t need because I can use the supermarket bags, one package of bags which seems to fall somewhere between semi-clear and clear, which is confusing, and just two (2) individual clear bags which I need the most and can’t seem to buy.

One of the other American teachers at my university lives in an area that requires red and yellow bags in some other bizarre scheme that I don’t understand. Come to think of it, red and yellow would be better than clear and semi-clear. I have a feeling, though, that red and yellow bags are in addition to the clear and semi-clear ones, adding another layer to the mystery.

The pictures here, and the one at the top, are on the trash receptacles at the university. Basically, it’s the same process of sorting as I do at home, but these are a bit more specific. You can see where to dispose of your t-shirts and your 2X4s, your sweaters, your socks and your shoes. T-shirts and 2X4s go in the same bin for some reason, but sweaters and socks need to be separated from shoes. Well, of course.

Apparently, Japanese students are in the habit of throwing away their clothes and their construction leftovers at school and some order needed to be imposed on the process.

It’s nice to know that there is recycling going on here, even if it is hard for a foreigner (well, anyway, this foreigner) to figure out. I have to admit, it’s made me aware of the huge amount of trash I generate just by myself and with awareness will come improvement. At least, I hope so, for myself, for Japan and for the rest of the world.

Got on my gentsuki and rode today. It was a beautiful fall day. It was nice and bright and warm all afternoon and actually reminded me of California in the fall. However, as soon as the sun started going down it got chilly and I'm writing this in front of an electric heater. The fall colors are not generally California-like, either. The mountains turn red and gold in Japan this time of year.

The pictures here are from a place called Kamakitako. Kita is 'north' and 'ko' is lake. I think 'kama' refers to the iron pot used in a tea ceremony, maybe describing the look of the small, kind of round lake.

I went up there last month, thinking that the leaves would turn in October, but they didn't. I'm glad that today was such a nice day, and a Sunday, so I had the time and weather to go back. It's only 10 minutes from my apartment, anyway.

I got some nice shots and included a few of them here before going on to write a bit about language.

And here we go...

A while back there was a picture featured in a column in the LA Times of a store in Japan displaying a prominent sign that read 'American Guts'. There seemed to be some question (not to mention shock) as to just what the shop owner was trying to say and the columnist wanted to know what his readers made of it. Well, no problem. For 'Guts' just read 'Goods' and 'Goods', of course just means 'Things'. The sign was just saying that the shop sold stuff from the U.S.

I have to admit that my immediate comprehension of the ad was not due to any particular intellectual jump, but can be laid totally to experience. Having been an ESL instructor for the past 20 (!) years, I'm fairly fluent in English as a Second Language English.

I do enjoy the oddities, I have to admit. To be fair, misuse of English is by no means just the province of new speakers and when I get back from Japan, I’m planning on writing about things I hear in the U.S. that I find amusing, as well.

For now, I’ll stick with where I am and give you some examples of things I’ve found interesting here.

In a small town outside of Tokyo, close to where I live, there is the small, unprepossessing edifice with the humble name of the Hotel Bob. I, personally, find this very funny. Not realizing the inherent cultural casualness of the word 'Bob', the owner of this particular establishment probably just liked the name. It has an American flavor that he wanted for showing sophistication to his clients.

Sometimes things just get lost in the translation, if that's not too overworked a phrase. In the dining room at the Hotel Bob, the management has gone out of its way to create a menu in English. I guess it, too, has to be for the cachet. I seldom see other foreigners in the area and I can't believe it was done exclusively for me, although this falls under the same heading as train announcements in English and Jehovah’s Witnesses with signs in English that I wrote about earlier.

Anyway, about halfway down the breakfast side of the menu, you will come across the entree entry 'Fungus Omelette'. Well, someone had been looking up 'mushroom' in their bilingual dictionary and while it's not exactly incorrect, I'm sure you agree that this is not the type of comestible offering that will exactly get the taste buds tingling in one of the English-speaking persuasion.

There's probably not any sort of a mold subtext going on incountry, even though Japan can be damp in one way or another just about any time of the year, but that reminds me of this. A popular Japanese fast-food chain fashioned, in a fashion, after an American hamburger joint sports the decidedly unappetizing moniker of 'Mos Burger'. Spelling aside, it's not really a name to stir the appetite. Even though conjuring up the idea of a Mos Burger is unlikely to inspire a late night munchies run, it should be noted their hamburgers are actually very good.

Japanese companies that choose to name themselves in English often just seem to marching to a different drummer. In Kawagoe, a similar small city close to the Hotel Bob, you can find Smell Fashion Designers. I don't have a clue how they came up with that one.

Just down the street from them, there's a branch of the electronics chain Hard-Off. Insert your own joke here... and here. Actually, 'hard-off' refers to deeply discounted merchandise, as any Japanese consumer knows.

My personal favorite I just noticed from the window of a friend's car as we drove through the endlessly fascinating streets of Tokyo.

Let me set this up a little.

Some language professionals subscribe to the idea that English found in non-English speaking countries is just another dialect. After all, the English aren't all that happy with what Americans have done to the language, but we still call it English.

One thing that's done to the Mother Tongue on both sides of the Atlantic is to shorten words and change them in many ways in order to adapt to particular situations or tastes. Take the word 'wizard'. Since the days of Merlin, we've lopped off half of the word and changed the meaning to the point where 'wiz' now just means someone who is very good at something... and that other meaning.

The shop in question, the one I observed from the car a few sentences back, was obviously trying for the first association. Unfortunately, it seemed to specialize in items connected to the canine species and there above the front windows, in letters approximately 6 feet high, were the words 'Dog Wiz'. Someone HASN’T been looking in their bilingual slang dictionary.

That makes rather a good segue to product names...

Such as Calpis Water... This Japanese soft drink sounds only vaguely disgusting, but I don't believe an American marketing research company would say 'Yeah. sure. Go ahead with that name. Sounds good to me'. Then add to that the fact that it is a soft drink which boasts milk as its main ingredient . Rather surprisingly, this too is pretty tasty. I much prefer it to Pocari Sweat. Yep, that's a name for another drink. Since it's a sports drink akin to Gatorade, you can see the logic behind the christening. Nothing like a nice cold bottle of Sweat after a good workout. We should consider the fact that Gatorade probably seems like kind of an odd name to the Japanese. I seem to remember it sounded strange to Americans when it first came out, too.

I once saw an a Japanese pencil case shaped and designed like an enlarged roll of lozenges that had the arresting slogan 'With a fresh pine taste'. In the U.S., of course, we reserve pine for scent alone and it has this connection with bathrooms that may tend to take away one's appetite. Displayed among other small oddities on a shelf at my house, you can see a box of Tobacco Candy. Just so there is no misunderstanding, the label also includes the words 'Tobacco Flavor'. Apparently it's a diet candy, because the makers also marked it clearly as 'non-sugar'. Of course. Who would want to eat sugar with their tobacco?

You may have noticed that the examples I'm coming up with here aren't really broken English, but just English that is used differently than you might expect. It's a big culture thing, the way language is used and you can't say it's being used wrongly, just ... oddly.

More next time...

One of the perks of working in a university in Japan is the time off. For instance, there were no classes last week because of the Komasai, the annual student festival.

Since I was going to be off from Friday to Friday, I decided to travel somewhere for at least a few days. I immediately ran into a problem, which should come as no surprise if you’ve actually been reading this blog.

The problem this time was that I couldn’t make hotel reservations online because I didn’t have a credit card. Let me rephrase that. I had a credit card, but it had been canceled. Why? Well, in accordance with some apparently divine plan to mess up everything I tried to do to come to Japan this time, my credit union had merged with another credit union and all cards had been canceled and reissued.

The problem was, no one bothered to tell me about it. I had gotten some information in the mail, I found out later, but of course that information was sitting on the kitchen table 5,000 miles away.

It took some time to get straightened out, but I had the card activated and put in the mail to Japan. However, the numbers wouldn’t work online for some reason. I didn’t really want to venture too far without a reservation or even a credit card. When I think about that, I realize how much I’ve changed. I once slept in a circus tent and lived on sausage and hard rolls for three days in London waiting for my flight home after I had overstayed my budget. I arrived back in L.A. without enough money to make a phone call for someone to come and pick me up. Come to think of it, that may be why I don’t want to do that anymore.

Anyway, there was plenty to see and do on day trips around Tokyo and I made my plans accordingly. On Saturday, I went to a huge book fair in Kanda, the used book store area of Tokyo. I buy and sell books in California in my spare time, so this was just great for me. I bought a nice book on Japanese art and culture from 1940 and saw a few tons of other books and had a nice day at it.

On Sunday, some friends took me out to an Italian restaurant for lunch and when I mentioned having gone to the book fair, they insisted on giving me a set of 12 ukio e (an old style of Japanese art) books that they were going to throw out. Throw out! I spend a lot of time trying to find books like that. There’s a different trash/recycle mentality here that I’ll have to get into at a later time. Anyway, that was another good day for me.

On Tuesday, I undertook a train trip to a place called Mt. Takao or Takao-san as the Japanese call it. It’s actually considered part of Tokyo, but it’s three-hour train ride for me - each way. There’s an online trip planner for trains in Japan, so it was relatively easy for me to figure out how to get there.

I got off to kind of a late start mostly because I don’t like getting up early, so I didn’t arrive until early afternoon. Let’s see - walk, train, change trains, change train, wait, change train, change train, wait again, change train, walk, cable car, Mt. Takao - yeah, about three hours.

The first thing you see from the mountaintop is a tremendous view across the Kanto plain all the way back to Tokyo proper. It really is an amazing view. Pictures can’t do it justice.

Mt. Takao is known for its fall scenery and since it’s fall and Tuesday was a national holiday as well as a day off for my university, it was a bit crowded. There were even a few gainjin (foreigners), which I never see in my home area. On the mountain, the main destination is a temple that’s been there since forever, I guess. I wandered around until I found it and was duly impressed. After that I just took off walking to see what I could see. I wasn’t worried about where I was because I realized long ago that you can’t get lost if you don’t know where you’re going in the first place. That’s been my philosophy of life. You may think that sounds a bit shallow, but it’s worked out for me so far.

So I walked and walked and thought about turning around and going back the way I had come and heading home, but I kept wanting to see what was around the next bend. That’s a corollary to my personal philosophy, by the way. Well, what I found around the last bend was the picture you see on this page.

I didn’t even know I was anywhere close to Mt. Fuji (Fuji-san) and was rather startled to see it off in the distance. What a reward for a long walk and a long day. The picture was taken with a telephoto, but the color is what my camera recorded, unaltered. It was just before sunset. That’s what gives the mountain its shine.

It was beginning to get dark so I turned round and headed back to the cable car. As I walked down the steps back by the temple, I noticed a group of people standing in the middle of the walkway with their cameras out. When I got to where they were, I saw what had stopped them. There was a full moon rising over Tokyo.

It was twilight on the mountain in the trees, but still daylight on the Kanto plain. What the combination of dark and light and city and moon and trees and mountain created was one of the most beautiful sights I have ever seen. It was surreal. I took several pictures, hoping to capture the scene, but when I looked at them later, none of them had come out. Something with the distance and the differing light caused bad exposures

and longer exposures which I hadn’t kept still enough for. I was very disappointed, but the picture you see here can give you some idea of what it looked like. This one was taken further down the trail when it was getting darker. It was still beautiful, but I missed capturing that golden scene at the first stop and I’ll always regret that.

Well, as I said, it was getting dark. Everyone was leaving the mountain and there was a wait for the cable car to get back down. After that, it was the train ride in reverse and three hours later, I was walking up the five flights of stairs to my apartment. Not quite like climbing up to a temple...

The next day there were still no classes. I went to school in the afternoon to start to get ready for Friday, but it was still an easy schedule for the last couple of days off.

The thing about living in the midst of a different culture is that every day has the possibility of showing you something new. My week off showed me the magic of the unexpected and made me realize. I live in Japan.