The Draws of Japan

I didn't have any inclination for this before I came here, but I really want to come back to Japan. The thing is I haven't even departed yet. Japan has so much to offer, see and do. Literally every weekend is full of things to do and it always feels so different from the weekend before. The streets are incredibly clean, people are more than willing to help you find your way and there seems to be change going on constantly. The culture is rich with diversity even though most westerners (including myself until recently) consider Japan extremely homogeneous. The stark differences in culture and language from my own has forced me to become self reflective of who I am and its very therapeutic.

I've been looking into options and the most lucrative one seems to be JET. If you're accepted into JET you're flown out to Japan to teach English usually in a semi rural area. Not only do you get to teach English, but you end up learning more Japanese than you ever would in a classroom. The pay is incredibly healthy for just graduating and if I can really get this Japanese language down it could help me immensely when I come back to the states to get back into marketing. I'm traveling an hour north this weekend to meet a former Bachelor of Science student who is actually in the JET program now and I'm working in getting in contact with some of the higher ups in JET through one of my professors here. I'm thinking fall 2011, but we'll see how that goes. I never thought I'd actually be in Japan a year ago so who knows where I'll be and what I'll be doing in two years.

This was a rushed post in between classes, but I'd like to start really disciplining myself and posting a lot more often. Set some time aside two times a week and jot down what's happening here in Tokyo and maybe some commentary on anything I find interesting. Get back to the roots of what this blog used to be.

Until next time!

Mt. Fuji - The Beast

Possibly one of the best memories I will have of Japan or life in general occurred over the period of August 21st 9:30AM up until August 22nd 3:16PM. In that time I had everything go wrong and oh so right at the same time. I couldn't get on a bus I had already paid for five people, I froze while trying to sleep on the side of the tallest mountain in Japan, I reached the peak with what little strength I had left and I happened to walk a mile or two extra down the mountain to get to the wrong checkpoint for a bus that wasn't there.

To start things off when my four friends Jason, Joe, Dan and Richie arrived at the bus station at 9:30AM with only minutes until the bus would depart we found out we couldn't get on. It turned out that the piece of paper I received from the booking agency wasn't actually the ticket, but instead it was the receipt. So even though they knew those five seats would be empty when the bus rolled on up to Mt. Fuji we couldn't get on. Even after the five of us continued to ask for managers and demand at least our money back they refused to give us anything to compensate our loss. This led us to take a combination of trains and buses that also turned out to be more confusing than one would think, but this was not nearly as frustrating as the original bus mishap.

We arrived at the 5th station early afternoon and proceeded to inspect each touristy shop and the temple that accompanied them. We met a Portuguese woman who was finishing up her six month traveling stint ending in Japan and had decided to climb Mt. Fuji. Technically the climbing season ended nearly a month ago so any climbers still going forth had slowly deteriorating weather to combat during the climb. We also met two German travelers, a couple guys from the UK and a handful of Japanese climbers while waiting. Unfortunately, all the shops and restaurants closed by 8:00PM so we were forced to the hard streets of the 5th station. To get the most rest possible we decided to try and sleep outside. We had a combination of sleeping in the pseudo alleys and walking around talking to the other foreigners until around 12:30Am when we decided to start the trek.

Now keep in mind that we are starting our hike up the 3,776m (12,388ft for you standard system folks) mountain in the dead of night with temperatures around 10°C (50°F) and around -2°C (28°F) around the peak. Along with the temperature falling you have to deal with decreasing oxygen levels and unless you've experienced it its difficult to explain the feeling of low levels of oxygen. You'll breathe but you don't feel like you take in nearly as much oxygen making it feel almost like your drowning in air. On top of that you have several types of terrain: two steps forward one step back gravel, nearly always switchback (climbing up diagonally to avoid the steepness), boulders and rocks that nearly make you go on hands and knees. This means when you finally do get a rest even after five minutes or so your heart won't stop pounding out of your chest because you just can't get as much oxygen as you're used to no matter how hard you try.

All of us reached the summit around 5:30AM and I can tell you without a doubt that it felt damn good to put my foot down knowing I didn't have to climb an inch higher. Everything was so beautiful from that altitude. The sun rise, mountains in the distance and the clouds all combined in unison to create some of the most stunning views I've seen in my life. The only thing that could compare was seeing the landscape in New Mexico on a similar, but much longer excursion.
These pictures won't do any justice to what I saw, the only thing I can add to them is to tell you to come climb it yourself. I will guarantee you won't be disappointing when you do.


Not me, but I promise I was there


First minutes of sun rise


One of my favorite shots from the climb


The center of the beast, 300 years ago there was magma spewing out.

All in all I would do it again in an heart beat if I had the opportunity. It might have bruised and beat me, but I can say "I climbed Mt. Fuji" and I've seen the sites she has to offer. Both those benefits outweigh anything that happened to prevent me from reaching the top. This had nothing to do with school, but I'm happy to say it'll be one of my

If you'd like to see all my pictures you can go to: My Facebook Album or My Webshots Fuji Album

School 1.0

As promised I would discuss how school is going here. After completing my full second week or maybe third, I don't know I'm losing track of time here...I'm comfortable saying that I know how the rest of the semester will go. Temple definitely has it's down sides, but it also has a lot MCAD couldn't offer even if it tried.

Academically, I definitely prefer MCAD's teaching approach, but after talking to several other current study abroaders I think its just that MCAD has a very unique teaching style that isn't often replicated. Gone are the weekly or bi-weekly assignments that are left to the student to be creative with and present to the class with whatever innovative idea they came up with, instead I'm writing seven page papers on International Marketing Operations and reading Clifford Geertz twice a week. Now don't get me wrong if you enjoy anthropology or sociology at all as I do you'll love the Japanese Ideology class I'm taking, but reading Clifford Geertz is a much different teaching style compared to most of MCAD. I have no doubt I will walk away from Temple learning possibly more than I have any other semester in my college career, but it won't be completely book smarts

In the three weeks I've been in Japan, I've come to realize this will be one of the single most important times of my life. Both in school and day to day life teaches me something new every day. Within the first 12 hours of me leaving the ground in Chicago it already started to become an extremely humbling adventure. Going into a world where you are 100% without a doubt the foreigner within a fraction of a second of someone seeing you makes you think about how people feel coming to the states. On the plane I thought I was absolutely positive I knew how to say "can I have chopsticks please", but instead of the chopsticks I only got a confused young Japanese flight stewardess. My response was one of embarrassment and a kick to my self esteem in speaking the language again. Obviously since then I've learned how to say "おはしおねがいします” with confidence whenever I'm lacking a set of chopsticks, but its still one of the most powerful moments I've experienced since I've left the states. To tie that back into Temple, I work with Japanese students of varying levels of English confidence everyday. I learn a little Japanese from them and they learn a little English from me. It really allows you to look at yourself and your culture from a completely new perspective.

Overall I'd say Temple is great for:

• Self reflection
• Learning to adapt
• Seeing how another culture does business
• Finding the finer points of asian culture, specifically Japanese

What Temple could work on:

• Project based learning
  
• Mutual agreement to emphasize learning before memorizing between all professors

To be fair, I realize that this isn't a tiny art school with many like-minded individuals and teaching in a strict academic style rather than organic conversational style is much easier on the professors. Its also much more akin to Japanese style schools. Out in the rest of the world this is a very common teaching method which has its pros and cons; I'm just used to MCAD's. Without hesitation, I'd still very much recommend this school to anyone who asked.

Newest Old City

Well, I've been here for a week and I'm barely finding time to post this, but I think I owe it to myself to take this break and summarize my journey so far. I didn't think I would be able to pinpoint the moment that I felt the "wow I'm going to live in a country that doesn't speak my language for four months" feeling, but I can tell you the precise moment that I did. Walking into O'hare to the ANA check in counter and seeing a mother, father and little girl no older than ten years old standing there is the precise moment it hit me. No question about it, that's when I felt.

Fast forward seven days and that's where I'm at now. There are a lot of little nuisance that you don't expect when you come here even after reading from the Culture Shock! series. You ALWAYS have to be passively on the look out for bikes since nobody is sure if they should ride on the street or side walk and they will go down sidewalks against the flow of people very often. On the train nobody will acknowledge anyone else unless. My professor who has lived here for 19 years told a story of a Japanese man who proceeded to get sick all over several people on a packed train and the only response he got was a grimace from those he hit. Most annoying of all...there are NO public garbage cans what so ever despite being the cleanest metropolis I've ever seen. I've walked from my house to the train station which is about a ten minute walk through residential and city streets and I had to carry a banana peel the whole way until I found the washroom in the station.

Tokyo is a lot like US cities though. Its what I would imagine Minneapolis would be in bizzaro world. The street plays music when its time to cross, toilets talk to you and you can buy anything from beer to school girl's underwear in vending machines that are no further than 100 feet from one another.

One of the coolest aspects about Tokyo is the mix of new and old. You walk in the heart of Shibuya or Shinjuku and you'd think you're in the 31st century. Walk through the alleys or residential streets one block over and you'd think you're in the 19th century. You can even be walking down some random and across the street from a 7-11 (By the way, one of the best places to get get a cheap really good lunch here, no comparison to the states) will be a Temple preserved from who knows how long ago. I've heard both complaints and praise about this. One side argues that they value spiritualism so much that they would never tear it down no matter who wants to build a skyscraper there and then the other side argues that if they valued it so much they wouldn't have built a major metropolis around it. However, I lean much heavier to the side of those who praise it.

I'll save my next post for describing the school environment. To give you a little hint 60% of the student body is made up of Japanese students, probably 25% from the US and another 15% from elsewhere. Unfortunately, the different groups tend to stick to themselves with a few exceptions.

Until next time!