aficionado

I've been in Japan for just over a month now and I'm having an amazing time. It's interesting to feel what it's like to be a minority. While scanning a room, a pair of raccoon- or fox-like eyes will be glancing about and land on you and stay there slightly longer than appropriate. or perhaps you might catch someone looking at you in the reflection of a subway window. Some people undress you with their eyes and others wear the expression of total and complete terror. The gaijin community is tiny and everyone knows someone who knows who you're talking about and it feels like fuckin middle school. I feel lukewarm about the majority of other gaijin here.


I've lucked out with my flatmates, though. Both went to school for philosophy, so we often have multi-hour conversations on philosophy, history, politics, literature, and linguistics. Other employees of my eikaiwa have not been so lucky. My British flatmate, Charles, is revoltingly witty, intelligent, and funny. My Californian flatmate, Scott, is mostly reclusive and has sacrificed social aptitude for extreme intelligence, the uncanny ability to recite H.P Lovecraft sonnets on the spot, and effeminate mannerisms. We all get along way too well. The place we're living now is pricey but in a month we're moving to a cheaper apartment and instead of buying anything new we'll probably rummage through discarded appliance bins.

I'm able to speak some Japanese (possession; coming, going, and returning; the eighty-three hundred different ways of saying "that;" ordering food; counting bowls, flat items, and in general; and numbers, which is different from counting), but I'm only beginning to learn how to read it, and I sure as hell can't write it. My boss, although quite nice and friendly, is rather strict when it comes to company policy and discourages talking and practicing Japanese at all, even to the Japanese front desk staff girls.

Because I have about $300 to my name, I've been spending most of my evenings lately sitting around the apartment drinking vodka/lemon concoctions called Chu-Hi and watching downloaded British comedy programs with Charles such as Day to Day, the Alan Partridge Show, Vic Reeves Big Night Out, Reeves and Mortimer, and Black Adder. But the best ones so far have been Brass Eye, The Armando Iannucci Show, and especially Spaced, Simon Pegg's show before he made Shaun of the Dead. I've also been watching Japanese samurai movies like Sanjuro, Yojimbo, Zatoichi, and Rashomon. all incredibly good.

I've been itching to go sightseeing like when I first arrived but I currently just don't have the time or money. I hope to take a dip in the onsens (hot springs) in a week or so. My eikaiwa will be closing during New Year's and I'd like to take a jaunt to Tokyo or Kyoto but it's not really possible at this point.

For a more indepth look at what life's been like here, I've been keeping a different blog and updating about once a week at....
http://sgt-spoon.livejournal.com/

Its intended audience is my family and relatives back home, so juicy details about certain things will be excluded, like the time when some of us went to karaoke and the Australian became so belligerently inebriated that he started taking off all his clothes and slapping people around, causing us to throw his drunk ass into a taxi, only somehow still managing to be escorted home by the police.
but, you can still check out neat pictures, some of which I posted in a new album entitled Japan-o-Rama