On the Road Again

So… It’s been a really wild two weeks finishing up the IJST program: Three finals, three speeches (all in Japanese, and one in front of the University president), two projects, and a lot of parties.

The finals and the conclusion of the regular class work were all fairly uneventful. I studied, they went alright. It was really strange to see how much I’d learned. On paper it definitely seemed like a lot, but I think that the really learning was more than that. Above anything else, I think I’ve learned how to bullshit in Japanese. How to nod my head the right way, grab the couple words I know out of every sentence, and generally look like I know what’s going on even though I’m totally out of it. When I first got here I couldn’t manage this at all. I would get hung up on what I didn’t know miss the rest of the sentence trying out in full detail the hard part of the sentence. So I suppose what I’ve really learned it how to roll with the conversation when it gets difficult. Of course there are still times when I have to stop the speaker, if I’ve missed every word in the sentence, or if I have no idea what’s going on in context. The amount of culture I’ve absorbed is pretty amazing too. Since I got here I think (hope) I’ve gotten better at picking up on things. The Japanese expression is “reading the air” and I think I can do it with more accuracy, although it’s still just as difficult as the name implies.

The weekend before the last week of classes we had a party with all of the SGE students and all of our host families. It was really cool to get a chance to see my host family again, and to thank them one more time. They’d put together a souvenir for me, a little book with some pictures, and a few pieces of origami that the kids made. It was really cool to see some of their picture from that weekend, it was a really great time, and I’m glad that it looks like they enjoyed it as much as I did. I really hope that I’ll be able to keep in touch with them.

After the formal party we hung out with the SGE students and partied a little longer. It was definitely tough to say goodbye to them. Even with as poor as my Japanese is I thought that I was really able to make connections with some of the students. Either way I know that we all had a great time with each other, and that I’m certainly going to miss them.

The last week of class was devoted almost exclusively to the final project. I know I haven’t really talked much about it up until now, but our final project was to build a Rube Goldberg machine. They’re pretty popular because of a public television show, Pythagorean Switch. If you look it up on Youtube you can see a lot of really cool stuff, they’re really good at them on the show. The kicker on the project was that everyone was paired up with a Japanese student, and we were expected to communicate only in Japanese. This resulted (even among the higher level students) in a lot of pointing, hand-waving, and picture drawing. Even that wasn’t unambiguous, I had a lot trouble working in the shop one day with my partner. In Japanese come to me is done by waving palm down and moving your fingers towards you. Go away is done by waving palm down moving your fingers away from you. Of course in America come is palm up, and go is palm down. So I saw the palm down thought he wanted me to go, when he actually wanted me to come. It was really confusing at the time, I could not figure out why he would want me to stay while he went to get parts. I ended up standing around looking dumb for about a minute before he finally walked close enough to hear him talking. At that point he asked whether or not I understood the hand signals, and we both realized what was going on.

A little more about my partner, his name was Kondo Hiroaki. He was a Junior mechanical engineer from a smaller town just north of Kanazawa. Like a lot of the SGE students he was really interested in coming to America to study. It’s a lot harder to do study abroad in Japan though. There are fewer programs set up for it, and it tends to be much more expensive.

Our part of the project was pretty unimpressive. The main part consisted of two pulleys. One had a magnet that was heavier than the counterweight; the other had a magnet lighter than the counterweight. When a block hit the switch at the beginning of our piece (we were working in groups of three pairs), it would release the heavier magnet so it could fall to the lower magnet. They would then stick together, turning both pulleys. The pulley with the lighter magnet had an arm that would hit a small car with a pin tied to it. This pushed the car down a ramp, where it would pop a balloon at the bottom, pushing over another block and raising the flag for the end of the project. I know it’s a lot of text on the page, but it was actually a really simple machine. Some of the other groups had some really complex setups using water. One built a shaft setup that would pop out marbles at regular intervals. Another popped balloons filled with sand so that the sand would fall onto pieces of paper with double-sided tape. The tape spelled out “Kanazawa”, and once all the balloons were popped it would life the pieces of paper into the air. Everyone presented their projects in front of the president on Wednesday. It was really tough to do in Japanese, but I think I’ve gotten much better at Japanese speeches since the beginning of the program.

On Thursday we had room-checkout and final conferences with our teachers before the closing ceremony at 4. Our plan was to leave directly after the closing ceremony, so we had our stuff all packed up and ready to go when we left for the ceremony. It ran a little long, so we had to hurry out as soon as it finished. We had to take a taxi from the station, and still missed the first train we had planned on. Colin barely made the second one, but GJ and I ended up taking a later on since he still had to do some paperwork to redeem his rail pass. We made it into Tokyo at 11:30, which ended up working out fine for us. Unfortunately it meant that Nobu had to go back and forth from the station 3 times that day, so he ended up spending something like 5 hours on trains. Sorry Nobu.

We stayed at Nobu’s for another two days after getting in, while we waited for some of the other Rose students to meet up with us. It was kind of strange to be back at Nobu’s and to see how differently I understood or thought about things compared to the beginning of the program. I guess it was another thing that made me realize how much I’ve really gained from the program. We hung out and went shopping a little bit, and Saturday night we went to dinner with his family. I also got to see Se-chan again, who we’d stayed with at the beginning of the program.

After meeting up with the other Rose students (we’re now GJ, Ted, Colin, Jamie, Loren, Nobu) we headed to Yokohama. Yokohama is a little south of Tokyo; it’s like a really large suburb. There was a festival the night we arrived, so the train ride was a mess. There were definitely a lot of people unhappy when we got on with our bags. We went to the festival that night to see the fireworks. It was really pretty insane. The streets were absolutely packed. Especially in the areas you could see the fireworks from, people were bunched in about as many as could fit. The fireworks were really beautiful though, it was a really amazing display, running for about an hour. There were some uniquely Japanese fireworks, like one of Doraemon, a Japanese cartoon character. It was surprisingly organized afterwards though. It really points out how much easier it is when no one is driving cars. Everyone just walked out in the streets without a problem.

Yesterday we more or less wandered around Yokohama. We made a stop at a small amusement park in the middle of the city and wandered around a shopping district for a while before taking the train down to the beach at Kamakura. The beaches here are really different, and it reminded me a lot of Wajima and Kanazawa. Rather than stretching off into the distance most of the beaches here are enclosed by cliffs or hills. We swam between 5 and 6 before getting out to head back. Before riding to the youth hostel in Yokohama we stopped at a Sento, a Japanese public bath. In Japan public baths are relatively common, and having been to one other back in Kanazawa, I have to say I like them a lot. Every bath has a set of showers, as well as a large common pool. Everyone showers before getting into the pool, which is usually kept hot (about 40 Celsius). The sento in Karakura was a smaller local one, with just the shower and bath, but some others have baths. The one in Kanazawa for example also had a cold bath, a sake bath, a sauna, and an electric bath (hot bath with low AC current through it). The sentos are usually fairly cheap, somewhere around 5 dollars, and are a really nice way to relax. They also use very little water, since the bath is just filtered and reused since it doesn’t really get dirty.

Today we’re on our way to Hiroshima. We’re going to be staying in another hostel there, and hope to see some of the famous temples, as well as the war memorial. Right now I’m on a Shinkansen (bullet train) between Osaka and Hiroshima. Having done a little more traveling I have to say I really love the trains here. They’re much quieter and more spacious than an airplane, plus they end up being faster since there’s no security or baggage check. The number of trains is also amazing because they’re used so much; when we missed our train leaving Kanazawa the next on left just 15 minutes later.

Overall, things are going really well here. Hopefully my internet will be more reliable, so I’ll be able to update a little more regularly. I’ve got two weeks left here, and I’m really looking forward to it.

Sorry there are no pictures. The internet in the Hiroshima hostel is sketchy in our room.