海水浴と温泉！

I really, really, really should be reviewing for my test tomorrow/writing my journal/preparing for my final speech right now, but I really want to talk about my amazing weekend. This weekend I made not one, but two trips to 湯の川 (Yunokawa), which is Hakodate's most famous hot springs (温泉) hot spot. Apologies for the bad pun. For some reason, 湯の川 is actually located right next to the ocean - don't ask me how you get hot springs 200 feet from the sea. I have no idea.


The past two days have been unusually hot - over 30 degrees Celsius, or 85 degrees Farenheit. Doesn't sound like much, but combined with strong sunshine, high humidity, and no air conditioning or fan, staying at home can be uncomfortable. Now going to a hot springs might not be the first thing that goes through your head when you get hot weather, but apparently Japanese people do it a lot and it makes more sense that you might think.


I had heard from the first day of the program that Hakodate was famous for its hot springs, with more than 100 locations spread out across the city, and that many onsen enthusiasts travel all the way across Japan to experience the hot springs here, but never actually had the opportunity to go to one. So to patch up on missing experiences in Hakodate (which still includes the no.1 night view in the world, by the way), me and a dude friend hopped on the tram (市電) and headed for 湯の川. We were completely clueless and made the terrible mistake of not even bothering to read reviews for the 20-30 something onsen spots that were there. However, it might have been a blessing in the disguise, because on our quest to find the perfect onsen, we found a beautiful enclosed beach that was bustling with people. Now despite its easy access to the sea, it's not easy to find a good beach in Hokkaido, and moreover you have to be there at the right time - I'd say there's about a six week window, max, for which sea water bathing (海水浴) makes sense. You don't want to head straight into the ocean if you don't know what you're doing, as we do get some pretty strong waves here.


So here we were, standing on this beautiful beach, with a grand view, and lifeguards and cute Japanese girls in bathing suits, and the water was cool but not cold, and the breeze so comfortable, and... we didn't have swimming shorts. Or clothes to change into. Oops. We ended up standing in the water for a long time, and withstood wave after wave until our shorts were soaked and our feet hurt from standing on pebbles. I haven't had the opportunity to go to beaches all that much before, so everything seemed quite new to me. I loved how the waves would suck up the sand from beneath our feet when it retreated. The sea breeze was intoxicated. We could see the misty silhouette of Hakodate-yama from the distance. It almost seemed like it wasn't Hakodate for a while, but Okinawa, it was so nice.


After the beach, we ended up going to a tiny onsen in an inconspicuous hotel with only two indoor pools and one outdoor pool, attracted by a ridiculously huge billboard slyly placed on an adjacent apartment building. Although the onsen was small, the water was bona fide mineral spring water, scaling hot and tasted quite salty (it was not on purpose, I promise).  Conversation proceeded, and good times were had. 


Today was equally hot as yesterday, and I successfully made up for my blunder (of not bring swimming gear) the day before by going to 海水浴 went with two Chinese exchange students (留学生) from next door. We first had a fantastic buffet (食べ放題) lunch at a  huge barbecue place, and then embraced the waves at 湯の川. It was a perfect day. Two important takeaways:


1. Damn seawater's salty.


2. Going to the beach with girls = WIN.


Gotta go to work now! Sorry for the lack of pictures - I wanted to make sure that my camera survived the trip. I'll be harassing my friends for pictures though, so there still is hope on this front. Things to look forward to next week:


a) Finally seeing the night view from Hakodate-yama.


b) The huge 港祭り (Port Festival) on Aug 1st, 花火大会 (Fireworks!), and of course, the イカ踊り(THIS).


c) My final speech at the closing ceremony!


Things that I'm NOT looking forward to:


a) Leaving Hakodate - I don't want to go at all! :(


b) Saying goodbye to all my friends. I've made quite a few good friends in the past two months, and it'll be really sad to see them go.


c) Leaving my host family: I'll definitely be missing 爺ちゃん's 野菜, 婆ちゃん's delicious　料理, and their combined 優しさ.


I love Hakodate!


Chris

My IS Project

I can't believe that I have only a week left! I'll be blogging about my thoughts regarding the passing of time here in Hakodate soon enough, but before I do that, I wanted to show you guys my IS (Independent Study) project. What I did was pretty simple - I visited some famous sights in Hakodate, and painted the scenery that I saw there. It usually takes me about 2-3 hours to finish the painting on the spot, but there was one that I painted off a photo and was a pain in the *** to do. Guess which one it is. I used mostly watercolor, although my first drawing was done in watercolor pencil, a medium that's actually much more difficult to control than it first seems. I also wrote some simple descriptions of the scenes in Japanese with a brush pen - the result is a failed attempt at calligraphy. Oh well.

During my 発表 (presentation) session, I talked a little about the places I went to and the methods I used. I actually got a pretty enthusiastic reaction from the host parents and classmates that attended, which definitely gave my ego a boost. So here are the pictures, five in total (I uploaded two pictures for my last blog, I think, but this is the whole thing):

ハリストス正教会
Hakodate Orthodox Church. Located in Motomachi (where HIF is), the Russian Orthodox Church was one of Hakodate's oldest buildings and is among its most famous. From this spot you can see the hourglass shape of the city of Hakodate - there's the sea on both sides and Hakodate-yama is to the back of us.

函館の坂
Hakodate is famous for its scenic slopes at the foot of Mount Hakodate. These slopes command beautiful views of the harbor. This picture was drawn at Motoi-saka (基坂), a very pretty slope next to Motomachi Park. This was my first painting done in watercolor!

立待岬
Tachimachi Point. Lying to the southwest of Hakodate-yama, Tachimachi Point stands at one end of the peninsula on which Hakodate lies, and directly faces Aomori Prefecture at the northernmost part of Honshu. The scenery here is spectacular, but unfortunately I did not come close to conveying it.

ベイエリア
The Bay Area. The Bay Area of Hakodate is the city's vibrant heart. The red brick warehouses here (赤レンガ倉庫) are historical buildings that signify the first opening up and commercialization of the port of Hakodate. They are now mostly utilized as souvenir shops.

五稜郭
Goryokaku. Perhaps Hakodate's most famous spot, the star-shaped fort was constructed at the end of the Tokugawa Shogunate period and witnessed the last battle of the Boshin War, which ushered in the Meiji Era. The drawing was done on the top of Goryokaku Tower, a building right next to the historical site of the fort that offers spectacular views of the city.

During the speech contest on Friday, I was going to the bathroom when I ran into Li-san's host mom and her daughter, who was about five or six years old. They were both at my presentation a few days earlier, and recognized me immediately. The little girl pointed her finger at me and cried: "テイさん絵がうまい！," which means "Tei-san is great at drawing," and I couldn't help but feel like this on the inside:

Well, that's all about my IS project. One more post coming up!

Two Weeks Left!

It's pretty hard to believe, but HIF is two weeks from being over! お婆ちゃん commented how little time I have left a few days ago, and I was really shocked. It's hard to believe that went by so quickly - in two weeks, I'll probably be sleeping in this hotel while rocking it out in Tokyo in the day. After my terribly planned trip to Honshu, it's a week at home and then BOOM! - I'm back at Yale again and the clock starts to tick on my junior year.


I'm really starting to get used to life in Hakodate, the great weather, fun classes, and especially my host family, who is starting to feel like my real 親類 (folks). They are just always way too nice, and especially お爺ちゃん way too awesome (he single-handedly made barbecue happen today, in addition to being able to fix bikes (and ride them), drive like a boss, manages a huge, thriving garden with strawberry patches, a grape vine and even watermelon, and did I mention he used to drive trains for a living? - he's an 82 year old man!) that I feel like I wouldn't mind having an extra grandfather and and extra grandmother. Of course my real folks are important, and not that I'd ever give them up, but I wouldn't mind having two more. Regardless of what happens, I'll be writing back (with my still very, very problematic Japanese) and sending back photos after I get back to China. It's the very least I can do.


What else happened this that's worth mentioning? Ah yes the barbecue that I mentioned! Without further ado, here's a picture of our glorious outdoor barbecue, Japanese style:

気持ちがいいでしょう！

One thing that I've been feeling pretty strongly this late into the program is that, my interest in studying Japanese has really flagged. Not only that, but motivation is becoming a huge issue for me. I'm becoming content to just pass by in class, not taking the time to make sure I memorize the vocab, and understand all of our readings and grammar points. I also find myself do less work outside of class. I keep a small pocket notebook for taking down new vocab I learn outside of class, and whereas I was furiously scribbling something down in the notebook constantly when I first got here, when everything seemed so new and exciting and I wanted to use my electronic dictionary everywhere, in the past week I've hardly even touched the notebook at all. I'm been even reluctant to actively search out opportunities to speak Japanese (I've still not had a meaningful, thoughtful conversation about a serious topic with my host family yet), and I realize how much of a problem that is - that's why I came to Japan in the first place, goddamnit!


The good thing is that I'm still really enjoying every moment of my stay here, and unlike my previous summer in Cambridge, I really don't have any complaints about anything. Even my douchebag housemate doesn't bother me much. (A brief note about this guy - I never talk to him if I have the option not to. Most days we don't exchange a single word to each other, which is pretty rare for two people who live in adjacent rooms and who study in the same class in the same school. I treat him as if I'm seeing thin air - it's pretty hard to ignore a 6'5" guy, but I've trained myself to do just that. Not going to rant about this guy here, but to put it briefly, he always has a sour, pissed-off face on, is constantly disrespectful, and has zero social skills whatsoever (and also has negative interest in interacting with me, which I realized after two weeks of trying to communicate with him). Weird, sometimes I feel like he's speaking Marsian or something, certainly not English. Needless to say, we do not get along.)


However, if my lack of motivation goes on, it's seriously going to affect how much I'm able to get out of these two months. I might end up regretting that I didn't get enough out of this program for a long, long time. The laziness and sense of complacency is exactly what I've been battling before at Cambridge and at Yale, and something I've vowed to overcome. Now, yet again, it just seems that I cannot work efficiently in my own room, and it's becoming increasingly hard to get away from my own bed.


I'll be updating next week on my efforts to combat this issue - I went out for a run yesterday when I felt like doing absolutely nothing, and it made me feeling great. These have also been cheering me up:

The first watercolor I painted! This is one of Hakodate's famous slopes, from which you can see the harbor!

Goryokaku park from Goryokaku Tower

A view from where I was painting from!

I've been drawing a lot for my Independent Study project, and I have five paintings in total, all of famous sights in Hakodate. Being able to use watercolor (borderline competently) and actually drawing on the spot has been super fun, and I look forward to presenting my work this coming Tuesday (発表, Japanese for "presentation," is usually a dreaded word for me, but not this time! :)) So here's to that I actually get my shit done and complete my goals for the program. Now I need to go back to all the work that I've been procrastinating for! 来週も頑張らなくちゃいけないよ！

BONUS picture: we made (probably the worst tasting) Japanese food in a Japanese cooking school with the other HIFers!

一人の旅

Over this summer, I’ve done something that I haven’t been very used to – that is, traveling and exploring new places on my own. There’s many reasons for this: the first of which is that I don’t have a cell phone during my stay in Hakodate, severely limiting my ability to contact other people and coordinate group events. It was probably a good decision overall not to get a cell phone since it would have cost me a minimum of 20,000 yen over two months (funny that I’ll be spending the same amount on a night’s stay in a Kyoto ryokan, or traditional Japanese hotel, in about three weeks’ time). However, it still makes life difficult in the short term.

Secondly, unlike my previous summer in Cambridge, during which I had some of my best friends from Yale with me the entire time, this summer I didn’t have any really well-established friends going into the program besides Abby. I did make a lot of new friends, to be sure, but it’s hard to become best buddies with someone in a month, especially when you live in different host families. Plus, there are inevitably going to be people that you don’t like (ahem, my housemate, ahem). I’ve found that I’d much rather avoid people altogether than bear the presence of people that I dislike. Plus, all of us gaijin tend to cluster together, and really destroys the cultural experience, I think. Especially when you have guys wearing their baseball caps backwards and talking English and laughing loudly walking down the streets of Sapporo – you just don’t fit in.

That’s why I’ve gone a quite a few expeditions by myself. At first I was understandably apprehensive, with the inevitable dejected feeling of a social outcast. There were people I really wanted to hang out with, but there was always some obstacle – whether it was other people who I really didn’t want to be with, or simply the fact that I couldn’t find them, period. It’s quite scary and a little sad when you’re standing at an intersection and start thinking: shit, am I supposed to go solo now? When you start walking, however, everything begins to feel different.

First feeling I get – I’m fitting in! Thanks to my pretty standard Asian 顔, as long as I’m not carry a map or grasping a camera in my hand, I blend right into the crowd. I feel like a part of the city, the place that I’m in, and I feel a connection with the people around me slowly forming. People even speak normal Japanese to me (of course when I open my mouth, they realize that I’m a foreigner and start going back to the usual routine of  「中国人？たいわん人？」). I also find myself observing everything around me more closely, and absorbing more details. Exciting new opportunities abound in unassuming places, and I can explore freely. I get to goof around, linger or rush to places however I like.

I spent a good chunk of my time in Sapporo exploring the city on my own, and I went to the big fireworks festival (花火大会) around the Hakodate Bay Area yesterday, alone. Walking along the shore, with all of the houses lit up, and truly, truly 素晴らしい fireworks lighting up the night sky, Hakodate yama with its dark green silhouette standing silently in the background, the ocean breezing caressing, and myriad people excitedly murmuring in their yukatas beside their loved ones, it’s easy to fall into a semi-meditative state, in which distractions don’t exist and all sensory information blends into one communal stream that washes over one’s brain and soaks it in sweet, sanguine fluid. Sorry I turned my bullshit machine on – please ignore the last part. :p

Yes, it looked something like this. Sorry for the lack of pictures - forgot my camera and couldn't have done a very good job anyway, probably :p

It is easier to think when there is nobody else to distract you. Not that I don’t appreciate company – I really wished my friends were there with me last night – but that walking alone gives you a different feeling that is unique and valuable in its own way. Of course sometimes you feel lonely, and you will undoubtedly want to relay all that you’ve gained through your one-man journey to your friends and family. That’s another way in which being alone can be valuable, I think – it really reminds you just how important your friends are to you. I never thought I’d be missing my friends so much after just two months’ time – as weird as this sounds, I can’t wait for school!

I’ll be emailing a lot of you soon too. I’m having a great time in Hakodate, and I hope all of my friends who read this blog are enjoying their summers too!

Sapporo, Fulano, end of term reflections, goals and more!

As I am typing letters into this Word document, our bus is passing through the outskirts of Sapporo on the back to Hakodate. In the past three days, I was able to get a taste of Sapporo’s irresistible charm. It is certainly a very “interesting” city, much more than Hakodate, although in the end I might find myself preferring the latter.

So before I go too much into detail, a little bit of background first: HIF is divided into two semesters (学期), with a four day break in between. For our semester break, the program arranged a trip to Sapporo, Hokkaido’s provincial center and Japan’s fifth largest city. In Sapporo, we lived in a very nice three star hotel in four person rooms for an astoundingly low rate of 8200 yen for three nights (the usually rate for one night!). In the day we hung around the city, browsed its myriad shops and visited a few tourist attractions, and at night we attempted to experience a little of the city’s famous (infamous?) nightlife. I also made a trip to Fulano (富良野), a rural township in central Hokkaido famous for its stunning lavender fields and fresh produce.

Sapporo

A planned city that rose in the wake of the Meiji Restoration, Sapporo was constructed according to a rigid grid system, making it extremely easy to navigate. While it now boasts a population of nearly two million, in 1857 Sapporo only had a grand total of seven (!) residents. It was chosen in the Meiji period to be the administrative center of Hokkaido, presumably for its location, although weirdly it isn’t a harbor city. I should do some research on why Hakodate, one of the most important harbors of this period, wasn’t chosen instead – maybe they needed a place closer to Hokkaido’s interior, to facilitate the growth of the entire province, instead of just the coast?

旧札幌農学校演武場（札幌時計台）, circa 明治１１年

Anyway, so much for my Wikipedia-isque introduction of Sapporo. Instead of listing everything I did in the city, I think I’m going to try to describe the general impression that it gave me. Each city is unique in its own way, and that point really shows with Sapporo. I feel that many Chinese cities in general are being over developed and losing their respective cultural identities. An argument could be made that infrastructure precedes culture, but ultimately, cities should become places where people can live comfortably, and not become “cities” just for its own sake.

Compared to Hakodate, Sapporo is much more vibrant. It has very few skyscrapers or super prominent buildings (the most visually conspicuous building is probably the Sapporo TV tower, which is still just a simple steel frame tower with a large digital clock display, while every other building seemed to be the blocky, ten to twelve floor type), but its streets brim with shops of every kind – from roadside Ramen-yas (a Hokkaido specialty) to Karaokes and 居酒屋 (Japanese bar/pub/restaurant) – as one HIFer commented: “This is a place that lights up at night instead of dimming down.” Businessmen walk briskly by in the morning and make cheerful ruckuses heading into bars at night, often in large groups led by senior associates of the company. There’s a lot of young people, and not just students either. By comparison, Hakodate has more of a retirement home feel – you feel that people are either tourists, fishermen, or simply just really old.

A random minor 祭り that we happened to run into on the street

Sapporo is also famous for its night life. Susukino (ススキノ), usually written in shining Katakana in the form of bright neon lights, next to huge billboards featuring ridiculously suave, homogenously groomed callboys) is a red-light district that lies only two blocks from where we live. Apparently, it’s one of Japan’s three biggest red-light districts along with Roppongi (六本木) and Kabukicho (歌舞伎町) of Tokyo and some-name-that-I-forgot in Fukuoka, Kyushu.

The lights of Susukino at night

While Japan has banned prostitution, apparently only coitus is explicitly banned. Therefore, all other methods of “sex” (I realize that the term is used loosely here, but hey, Google this up, kids) are all still on the table. We walked around quite a lot in this area in the past few days, but actually didn’t go into any of the clubs, because a. it was horrendously expensive, with prices almost always twice as high for men as for women; and b. they were sketch as hell. The signs that you could see from the streets alone could add up to a porno. I’m not going to go into detail here, but as you can probably imagine, Susukino certainly paints another side of Sapporo.

Yes, apparently shit like this happens. Don't ask where or who is this - stole from the interwebs :p

In the end, Sapporo is a city full of interesting contrasts. It was meticulously planned and is rigidly laid out, but its atmosphere is light and carefree. It’s certainly a very, very modern city (I window shopped the Tiffany’s store), but also bears the history of its 開拓使 (name of the Meiji officials that were sent to Hokkaido to plan its initial development) past. For example, the red-light district that is now Susukino was actually included in the 開拓使’s original city blueprint in the 1870s, as a way to lure laborers from Honshu into staying in Hokkaido and enduring its unwelcoming winters.

One night me and friends were sitting on adjacent benches in Sapporo’s central park (大通公園), beers (the world famous Sapporo beer, of course) in hand, the lights lit hues of soft orange, and it had just been drizzling a bit an hour before. The grass was wet, but the pavement was dry. Two Japanese girls right beside were taking turns playing the guitar and sang. Another friend played a small drum. We chatted over unimportant things that I’ve already forgotten, but I don’t think I’ll be able to forget that night, when I stretched out on the wet grass and from the corner of my eyes saw the flickering lights from the looming TV tower. That’ll always be my memory of Sapporo.

Sapporo Beer Museum! Where you can get a glass of ice cold beer, plus free cheese and crackers, for 100 yen. Heaven on earth.

A gallery of advertisement pictures for Sapporo beer. An interesting conversation about the portrayal of masculinity ensued.

Japanese Clint Eastwood, anyone?

Fulano

I’m starting to get a little dizzy from typing so much on the bus, and Fulano’s scenery needs to be shown rather that told, so I’ll just let pictures do the talking for me. Yes I have proven numerous times that I AM that lazy. :p

So much lavender!

Me! Looking kinda of dumb, must admit

Us taking the Lavender "bus" (really an odd tractor of sorts) at Lavender East!

The three members of our trip - me, Ko-san, and Cyo-san

The past month + goals

This is going to be slightly 困る (troublesome) because I’m supposed to write about this for my Japanese journal today, but I do want to look back on the past month and review my goals for HIF. I know I wrote in my first blog that I was going to talk about my goals and allow for enough time for reflection, which I have shamelessly ignored since, but this may be a good (and final) opportunity to do it.

Regarding my study abroad experience on the whole, I’ve been extremely happy about the way the past month has went in general. I’m less happy about my own effort with regards to Japanese learning and socializing with other HIFers, but I feel like it’s still been a month worth building upon.

First of all, Hokkaido, HIF, and my host family, all of the environmental factors so far, have been nothing short of amazing. Hokkaido is a truly beautiful, beautiful place, with a welcoming people, and I found myself positively fascinated with Japanese culture and society. Like almost any other foreigner, I’ve so impressed by how polite and orderly Japanese people are. One thing that I’ve noticed in particular is their utmost respect and devotion towards culture and tradition, which used to be the pride of the Middle Kingdom. Our traditions have been now kicked to the curb and are almost impossible to retrieve.

The HIF program runs like a well-oiled machine, and my Japanese sensei is wonderful. Everything’s been so good there’s literally nothing to write about here.

With regards to myself, I think that my effort level has been inconsistent. The bad thing with going to school with a lot of other 留学生 is that people always end up conversing in the language they’re most comfortable with if left to themselves – I’ve spoken English and Chinese almost exclusively for the Sapporo trip – and nothing destroys your confidence in a new language more than speaking extensively in your native tongue. The incredible (comparatively speaking) expressive freedom that I get with English/Chinese highlights how poorly I speak Japanese, and it’s hard to go back.

I wish I had spent more time studying vocabulary on my own, which is really the biggest obstacle in my Japanese studying right now. I have tried using Anki, but every day I come home and feel really tired, and have trouble maintaining focus. I can barely keep up with the 3-4 hours of homework that we get each day, and always end up pushing my IS project and additional studying back. The result is, nothing has gotten done. A consistent work ethic is one of the main things I had decided to work on this summer, so hopefully this situation will change soon.

Another one aspect of the summer experience that I’d to talk about is my relationship with the other HIFers. I find myself shying away from the big Gaijin groups, because it really takes me out of the cultural atmosphere. I’ve also come to realize that I often judge people pretty hard, and I’ll go out of my way to avoid people I don’t like, even if that means I won’t have the chance to be with people I moderately like. Not sure how this is going to change in the near future, as I simply cannot put up with people who I have a strong distaste for. I am enjoying being alone more than I had imagined possible, though. This is a point that I’ll continue to think about in the next month.

So finally, before the quality of this column really begins to taper off, my goals for next month:

1.     Try to spend weekdays 日本語だけ. I find that if I only speak Japanese for longer stretches of time, my confidence builds up and I improve very quickly. Instead of just speaking Japanese at HIF and with my host family, I want to force myself to not speak Chinese or English.

2.     Catch up with my IS project! My independent study project is to paint/draw around 5 signature images of Hakodate. True to my procrastinating ways, I currently have … 0 presentable paintings. I need to get on this fast, and I need at least two by this Friday. This needs to happen!

3.     Use Anki everyday. I want to manually input all new phrases I learn each day (I’m starting to become insensitive to new words/phrases, which is terrible), and do a daily review.

4.     Start reading 「ノルウェイの森」 (Norwegian Wood, the Murakami classic and one of my favorite novels) and manga in Japanese! It’s going to be a dictionary fest, but I need to start trying.

5.     Watch every episode of 多部ちゃん’s new drama, 「浪花少年探偵団」!! I can understand about half with the assistance of Japanese subtitles, and I’m having a wonderful time. Just caught an episode today, and I’ll be tuning in for sure every Monday at 8pm. Baa-chan seems to be enjoying it too, so it looks like I won’t be the only person watching it! J

That’s it for now – whew. That was a long one. I’m going to put up the pictures and go to bed now – tomorrow’s going to be a good day (hopefully)! Also, I’ll be sending postcards from Furano soon! Look forward to them! J