A smoky nation

   One of the risks of line drying your laundry in Japan is that sometimes when you take it down, it smells like smoke. That's because people in the countryside love to burn little piles of weeds in their yards. I assume that's what they're doing, anyway. All I know is that I often see little fires burning in people's yards.

    Japan is also more liberal with smoking. There's a smoking section in every cafe and restuarant. And in bars or izakayas, the smoking section is usually just the whole bar. One exception is Starbucks, where smoking is banned inside, period. They post a polite little sign outside saying that they don't want the smoke to interfere with the enjoyment of coffee. Other exceptions are McDonald's and KFC. Notice a pattern?

    So often when I come home after I've eaten out or even just wandered around a city, I'll notice that my hair and clothes smell like smoke. 

    Sometimes I see these whacky posters which I guess are supposed to be part of an anti-smiking campaign. In the US, anti-smoking campaigns usually tell you about how you'll get lung cancer and die an ugly death, but the Japanese posters take a more subtle approach.

   I love how these posters always have perfect English. Clearly they hired a native speaker to translate them. I think I should have that job.
  
   If you want to see more of these hilarious posters, google "japan tobacco posters."

You can see it in their eyes

   Sometimes my students ask me why I wear glasses.

   At first I didn't understand the question. They had classmates who wore glasses. Surely they knew that some people have bad eyesight.  But then I started asking around and discovered that a lot of people in Japan choose to wear contacts because they don't like the look of glasses. I guess hipsters haven't convinced everyone how cool they are yet.

   I blame this on Japanese tv shows. Usually when characters wear glasses, they're either evil or dorky. If they're dorky, someone eventually makes them take off their glasses and their eyes get ten times bigger and then everyone realizes that they're pretty. And then they finally find someone to marry and they never wear glasses again. Cause that's how things work. If they're evil, their glasses will often glow opaque as they plot and scheme. You can't see their eyes so you know they're evil. Often they'll menacingly adjust their glasses while they're calmly explaining how they are going to murder everyone.

 
   My glasses usually start to glow evilly when I'm scheming, too. Such a give away.

Castle in the Sky

   This weekend I visited a nearby city with a friend. Compared to other cities I've visited, it was a ghost town. It seemed less cared for, and the streets were emptier. The stores that were open had an old-timey air.

   We visited the castle -- most major cities seem to have one. The castle was at the top of a mountain on the edge of the city. When we arrived at the park at the base of the mountain, we walked past an unattended bicycle holding four bunnies in two baskets over the front wheel. The rabbits were panting in the heat, and their owner was nowhere in sight. I felt pretty bad for them. 

   We took the gondola up the mountain because we read that the hike to the top usually takes an hour, and it was in the nineties that day.  When we got off, we still had a bit of a hike to the castle.

   I've only been to two castles in Japan, but I'm pretty sure the insides of them are always mini-museums. They don't try to preserve the castles as they were so that you can see how powerful sociopaths lived back in the day. But we did get to see some cool weapons, including these ninja throwing stars. I was never really convinced those actually existed until I saw them on display in this castle. 

The top floor of the castle was ringed by a balcony, so that you could see in all directions. 

   You might notice all the crows hanging out on that metal contraption. Crows in Japan are ridiculously big. One time at school I heard what I thought was an angry old man shouting "baka! baka!" (idiot, idiot!) over and over, but when I looked out the window it was just a crow.

   We decided to hike down the mountain because the gondola ride was really expensive. I've been hiking in America a few times, but this was hiking on a whole new level. We asked around for the easiest trail, and its entrance didn't look too daunting. But all too soon, we encountered this:

   That's the trail. A craggy waterfall of rocks, some of which were loose, and all covered in plenty of dead leaves to trip on.  It was a lot of fun, but it probably would have been easier to climb up, since we could have just gone on all fours.

   As we descended, a few ojisans (old guys) casually strolled past us, going twice our speed. Then a family passed us by. The youngest daughter hopped, skipped, and jumped her way down, while her father half-heartedly warned, "That way's dangerous, walk on this side," and the mom and older daughter ignored the dad and followed the crazy little girl.

   It took us about an hour to get to the bottom. If we were Japanese I guess it only would have taken us half an hour. Later I read about it on Wikipedia. Apparently we walked down the trail that Kindergarteners take when they visit the castle on school trips.

A stranger in a strange land

   The rainy season ended in a bout of thunderstorms. Now that the skies have cleared, the temperature has risen. It was body temperature today. My head felt like a baked potato.

   This weekend a friend drove me around. We stopped at a rest area near this awesome dam. The area I live in (and maybe most of Japan?) has a lot of rivers and streams. In fact, there's a small dam on the river behind my apartment, a couple miles to the east of where I live. But this dam was huge. We drove up winding mountain roads that gradually climbed until finally we crossed this ridiculously high bridge spanning the distance between two mountain peaks. Way below us, tiny villages ran between the mountains like streams.

   I've been hanging out with some local foreigners lately. I've noticed that other foreigners are pretty easy to befriend here in Japan. People make plans more quickly, offer help easily, and are more inclusive. People offer you rides, ask to do things with you, and even offer to let you crash at their place - and they don't wait until they've known you a while. They do it the first or second time they meet you.
   Part of it is that they want to speak their native language and be with people who share their own culture and values. Another reason is that foreigners in Japan, especially ones in the countryside, tend to be a pretty lonely bunch. Japanese people are often kind and almost always polite, but as a group they are pretty reserved. And for foreigners with limited Japanese skills, it's even more difficult to build a social life.

    As someone who's pretty reserved myself, it's an interesting experience. I've become more forward about befriending Japanese people, too. It's fun. It's made me realize that you don't have to have known someone for a long time to have an adventure together. Other people are interesting.

Peeled plums

   Every day during school lunch, a few of the students announce the menu over the school intercoms. They usually add something about how the food is made, or why it's eaten at this time of year, or how it got its name. These announcements are an important part of school lunch, because the kids are supposed to be learning about what makes up a balanced, healthy meal. The other day, we had plums on the menu, so in the announcement, they talked up how delicious and wonderful plums were. They also informed us that you can eat the skin on a plum, and in fact, you should, because it's very nutritious. 

   The room was immediately filled with shocked teachers saying, "Really?? You can eat the skin??" One of them had already started peeling his, and he dutifully stopped and ate it whole. 

   Meanwhile, I was making a mental note. 

   Fermented soybeans: Yes, please!

   Fish heads: Oh boy, they look delicious!

   The skin of a plum: I don't know man, are you sure?

  

   There are some nice things about living alone. But there are also some downsides. For example, I discovered that I am incapable of finishing a pint of milk on my own before it goes bad, unless I really put my mind to it. A pint! It's not that much milk. Of course, the real tragedy is that it's not even milk I want to drink. I'd rather buy cream, because the only time I use milk is when I make coffee or curry, and cream would do a much better job in both cases. But in Japan, you can't find cream. They do sell whipping cream, but nothing in between. Whipping cream doesn't taste that great in coffee.

   When you live with other people, food builds up. People buy things and don't eat them, and then days or weeks later, someone else enjoys them. You have stocks of spices, soups, and broths, and you always have a bag of onions lying around. I tried buying a bag of onions. I used two of them and the rest slowly molded until I finally threw them out.
   On the plus side, if there was ever a country to do grocery shopping for one in, it's Japan. You can buy tiny portions of just about anything. They sell eggs in packs of four, six, and ten. You can buy anywhere from 3-8 slices of bread. (Not more though. They don't eat that much bread, I guess). You can buy bunches of six asparagus stems, a single pepper neatly packaged in its own plastic bag, or a couple of ounces of chicken, already cut up into bite sized pieces. I don't know if they just don't eat a lot of the things I like to eat, or if most people only cook for themselves.

  

Play by the rules

    The rainy season is living up to its name. It's hindering me from parkouring after work, and it's also hampering my attempts at laundry. On the plus side, it's keeping the temperature in the 70s most days.
 

    

   At preschool, the students come in by bus, bus since the school only has one bus, they do it in three shifts. So while we're all waiting for everyone to show up, I usually walk around and play with the kids. Among other things, there's a set of colorful plastic blocks in each classroom. It always fascinates me to see the different ways the kids used them. 
   The younger kids can't make much with them, although the little boys are very proficient at making guns. Sometimes they make cell phones out of two blocks, bent at the joint, and call each other on them. They say things like, "Yeah, I'm just leaving work," or, "I'm on my way to the company now."

   The older kids make more interesting things. They usually make cars, trains, and helicopters. One kid always makes this super cool "zoo." It has multiple stories and rooms, and it even has gates tha turn on their hinges and connect the different living spaces. 
   They also have this weird, smaller set of blocks, in which each piece is half of a cube, cut diagonally. The kids seem less sure how to play with this set, and the first time they introduced it to me, they told me I could make a house, and nothing else. They put three blocks together and showed me. "Cool," I said, and then I made a giraffe. It blew their minds.
   Little kids can sometimes seem to be obsessed with rules when it comes to playing games, and I think it's because the games they play mostly happen in their heads. Since they aren't imagining the same things, they have to make rules so that their hallucinations match up enough to happen at the same time. I remember when I was little, I used to play with my cousins sometimes, using a set of horses. We all wanted really different things out of the game. One of them always wanted to put on some kind of parade or competition between the horses. The other was really obsessed with naming them and splitting them into families. Sometimes I would get upset because tehy would impose personalites on the horses that didn't match up with how I saw them. So we would all have to think up rules for how to play so that we could play our slightly different games together.

   That door is way too fancy for that building. 

   I don't know what this building is! The kanji for fish is written on top. It looks like it's meant to store something, but I really hope it doesn't store raw fish. There were a couple of buildings like this in town.

Household remedies

   This week I got another cold. I used to get colds on a regular basis in college, but once I graduated they became more infrequent. Now they're back.
    I went to the drug store looking for something like Nyquil, to be confronted with this:

   Reading through a bunch of labels in Japanese looking for katakana-ized drug names that I barely remember in English was not something I was up to. Plus, some of them had pictures of ginger on them and looked more old-timey than I could trust. So I texted my friend, who informed me that the only way to get good cold meds in Japan is to go to the hospital. None of the drugs at the store were claiming to help you sleep, but apparently a doctor will prescribe you something similar to Nyquil.
   Nyquil itself and some other over the counter US drugs are illegal in Japan. I forget the exact ingredient that makes them illegal, but I think it's the one that helps you sleep. In fact, a month before when I asked a man at the pharmacy where I could find the sleep aids or even some Melatonin, he looked around for a minute before informing me, "I don't think we have anything like that." So maybe sleep-inducing drugs are more closely regulated here.

   I didn't have the energy to go to the hospital just to get cold medecine, so instead I drank a pint of orange juice, ate some spicy ramen, and slept for 12 hours. 

   

   Problem solved. 

   People seem very ready to tell you to go to the hospital here. A few weeks ago when I felt sick at work, my coworkers told me to go. I've heard other people receive this advice, too, usually over pretty minor symptoms like nausea or a cough. I suppose this is because national health care makes it a lot cheaper to drop in for minor illnesses. According to the Book of Knowledge, Japanese people visit the hospital four times as often as Americans do. I can only assume it must be a less harrowing experience here. Personally, unless I'm not sure the illness will pass on its own, I'd rather curl up in the fetal position and try to pass out, instead of trekking all the way to a hospital where I have to be coherent and alert.

      Hopefully I'll never find out how going to a hospital in Japan is, but it would make for an interesting experience.