Odds and ends of Japanese life

Today I'm staying home due to sickness. I've been sick for about a week but it's just been a cold. I assumed if I sleep for an extra five-ish hours, maybe I'd get better in time to climb Mt. Fuji tomorrow. I think I do feel better. :) The only bad thing is now I have a LOT of homework to be doing. I'll get on that right after this blog post!

I found this great link from our tour guide at the Edo Museum. It's his personal website, with all the information he told us at the museum and probably more! He was such a great guy. He even has a picture of our group. :)

Tonight I'm having dinner with Alex Kilkka!! So excited about that. He's staying in a capsule hotel, so I'm sure I'll try to get a picture and maybe even crawl inside it. Then we're having dinner with my host family, yay!

Yesterday after class, my friends and I made some plans for our Mt. Fuji trip and Sachi backed out. :/ So now it's just Robert, Ethan, and me, but it'll still be great. I bought some protein drinks and bars, some ingredients for sandwiches, and a few other things I need. I've been packing my bags: the one for the ryokan (traditional Japanese inn) and the mountain backpack for the climb that my host family is lending me. They also gave me a rain coat and rain pants! So happy. :D The weather, especially wind and rain, is always ridiculous on Mt. Fuji.

We bought bus tickets to get to the mountain and I guess we'll find a local bus to the 5th station once we get there. Because Mt. Fuji is a very gradually-sloping mountain that only becomes steep near the very top, it would probably be like walking on a flat hill if we were to start at the legitimate bottom. By the time we'd get to the top, we'd run out of water! We'll be climbing through the night so we can see the sunrise at the top, at about 4am. It's going to be COLD COLD COLD at the top and HOTTER THAN HADES at the bottom, or so I hear. Rainy and dusty and overall a very difficult trip. But I look forward to saying that I have climbed the highest mountain in Japan. :D That will be July 7-8th. Then we'll relax at the ryokan!

We decided that the day after we climb Mt. Fuji, July 9th, we'll all go to Fuji-Q Highlands, the rollercoaster park at the base of Mt. Fuji. :D I'm so excited! In Japan rollercoasters are known as "jet coasters." Fuji-Q Highlands has one of the world's tallest/fastest rollercoasters, Fujiyama. :D At the convenience store by our school, we can get day-passes for 3700yen, or about 38-39 dollars.

Speaking of numbers that are lower than I expected, I'm losing a lot of weight here. It's not because of the small portions, because I often eat until I am very full. But Japanese food has very few calories; sometimes entire meals have only 300 or 400 calories! I also drink water instead of soda or juicy drinks, and I'm walking 80+ minutes every day as part of my commute. Then I climb the 9 flights of stairs at my apartment so I won't get humiliated on Mt. Fuji. :) So it's easy to lose weight. I'll try to gain it back when I return to the US! Last semester I was 117 and now I'm 111.

I had a pretty funny/embarrassing language error the other day. I wanted to say to Namiko-san, "If you see a bathroom, please tell me/say so." But what I said was the literal version of that, "お手洗いを見たら、いってください。” But I forgot that いってください can either mean "please go" or "please say". So she thought I said, "If you see a bathroom, please go!" We laughed about that. The proper thing to say is, "If you see a bathroom, please teach me (where it is)".

I sent this email to my friends today, but it is actually really relevant to the blog! So here, learn some about Japanese pop culture, especially the parts that have been influenced by black American culture.

We had a lecture yesterday about pop culture in Japan and one of the topics was Japanese rap. Most Japanese rap isn't based off of class struggle or racial discrimination, and Japanese don't really relate to the ghetto origins of American rap, but they rap about generational and political struggles in Japan. There are plenty of social problems here but they don't get as much attention as the "kooky" image of Japan that the Western media loves to promote.

Japanese rappers get a sense of toughness and credibility from the rap culture created in America. One interesting thing is that Japanese rappers have to add artificial stress to their words to make them sound more like English; otherwise the language would flow too smoothly to be rapped.

Curious to see what you think of the two most distinct types of Japanese rap: party rap (fun lyrics about everyday life, meant for playing at a party; mostly female audience) and underground rap (darker, often political, and goes against traditional Japanese societal norms; mostly male audience).

Underground:
Zeebra, "911" (they call the Sept. 11th terrorist attacks "nine one one" in Japan) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ze8PfbT2Bp0

Party:
Foxxi Misq, "Luxury Ride" (note the huge cars... I see them everywhere here, which doesn't make any sense in a city as packed as Tokyo) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnUV7I1X6mg

Also interesting to note about that party rap video is that it features Zeebra, the same underground artist as in the previous video.

This isn't rap but it might be the most interesting video from the lecture: Jero, a 3/4 black American, 1/4 Japanese singer who modernized the Japanese traditional enka music style and has had great success in Japan: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWCBW14PTfA