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Reading some of the weirder mnemonic out loud usually nets me a few weird looks.

Do you remember back when we were kids? We would get those sheets of paper at the beginning of each school year which would tell us which supplies we needed. The first year I took French in middle school on that list was an French-English dictionary. I could probably walk over to the dusty bookshelf in our study and still find that very same book, undisturbed for years. When I first got it, I flipped through the pages, scanning, glancing at random words that caught my eye. That’s probably the closest I’ve gotten to actually using it.

I was always terrible at Chinese school. Back then I had this red Chinese-English dictionary, towards the end of it’s use the cardboard on the spine was well on its way to separating from the mesh that kept the pages glued together. Every week we would learn something like ten or twenty new vocab words which I would cram for and then promptly forget the next week. In addition to the weekly quizzes, there was always a reading passage that the teacher would make us read outloud in class, every student would get a sentence or two. To hide my illiteracy, each week I would go through the new passage and look up every single word. In the small space above each character I would write in the pīnyīn that was my crutch. Sometimes I think if instead of spending all that time on faking my literacy, I spent it on learning Chinese, I would probably be able to read the chinese menu in Chinatown by now. I did this for nine years.

Enough about the past. I’ve been thinking about dictionaries recently, or more specifically words. I’ve started prepping for the GRE (which is “the SAT for graduate school”) this past week, out of fear of the future (dun dunn dunnn). What immediately became clear after taking a practice test was that they use some seriously fancy vocabulary. Words like

Gossamer (adj.) - Characterized by unusual lightness and delicacy

Parsimonious (adj.) -  Unwillingness to spend money or use resources

both of which I learned through GRE flashcard decks. Suddenly, I realized that I knew a lot less English than I thought I did.

During this time I was also finishing up Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (which I highly recommend), and I found that there were unfamiliar words that cropped up in that text. That got me thinking, how much vocabulary do I gloss over on a daily basis? Have I gotten comfortable with thinking that just because I’m a native speaker I no longer needed to look up words? That I could understand their nuance through pure context? That leads me to synonyms. How do you tell the difference between

Upbraid (verb) -  find fault with (someone); scold

Lambast (verb) - criticize (someone or something) harshly

Castigate (verb) - reprimand (someone) severely

Because they’re so rarely used, I’ve never gotten the exposure needed to understand the subtlety between the three.

On the other side of the spectrum, my flashcards have enlightened me to the fact that there are words that I have been misusing and misinterpreting my entire life. I always thought that ambivalent meant that you didn’t care:

Ambivalent (adj.) - having mixed feelings or contradictory ideas about something or someone.

I also thought that being disinterested meant that you didn’t care:

Disinterested (adj.) - not influenced by considerations of personal advantage.

In addition to beefing up my english vocabulary I’ve also started reading Polar Bear Cafe (しろくまカフェ) which is a manga about Panda (and his friends) who are regular customers at the Polar Bear cafe (I recommend the anime).I’ve been spending a lot of time looking up Japanese words I don’t know. But it’s so rewarding in those moments when I read an entire page or two without having to reach for my phone.

I mean who isn’t?

I’ve been using a product called WaniKani for the past few months to learn kanji, and it’s working out pretty well. I’m at 715 kanji learned as of this blog post. I also super recommend this for anyone who has tried to pick up Kanji and then slid down the slippery slope of not doing it daily. After finishing their curriculum, which would put me around 2000 kanji, I’m going to work on actually learning Chinese this time around.

[Japan 2015] A day in my life in Sendai

Yeah so this blog post is way overdue, but better late than never right? If you watched (or most likely didn’t watch) the video it’s “A day in the life” video of me in Sendai, but more like two days. I'll spare you the nausea that comes from shaky phone camera footage and cover the places that I frequented most often.

Monday/Thursdays:

On Mondays and Thursday I had Japanese classes in the morning, I think class started around 8:30am so I needed to leave from my dorm at 8am to get to Kawauchi Campus on time.

The aforementioned Kawauchi Campus.

On the left if you zoom in with your eyes you’ll see building C which was attached by a walkway to building B which is where we had our bi-weekly Japanese lessons. I’m pretty sure that this class went twice the pace as my class at Wellesley did. We covered an entire textbook in a semester rather than the two it took at Wellesley.

Fallen bikes on the Kawauchi Campus.

Japan’s pretty big on bikes, whether it’s the human powered kind or the motor powered kind. I remember one particularly windy day when I was walking back to my bike, all the bikes in this particular parking lot were toppled like dominos.

My study away program was the “Junior Year Program in Engineering” which basically meant that we got to do engineering in English while in Japan. Part of the program was to pair you up with a research lab so you can do “research”. I ended up picking an architectural lab (even though I have no background at all in architecture) since their work on earthquake and tsunami reconstruction interested me.

The expectation was that you would go to the lab every single day. So what would happen is after Japanese class I would go get cheap cafeteria ramen (~500 yen) with my friends and then rush to catch the bus up to Aobayama Campus. Aobayama in Japanese means something to the degree of the mountain with green foliage, really poetic I know, but the first time I went there I had no clue that it was actually on a mountain, so what was suppose to be a 15 minute bike ride was a torcherous fight with gravity that ended up with me arriving to the lab meeting late and introducing myself to my lab members  completely drenched in sweat. Needless to say I no longer tried to bike up Aobayama anymore.

Afterwards I would take the campus shuttle to get to the architecture building.

The Department of Architecture and Building Science

It’s a pretty funky looking building, I was told it was designed by a famous architect. It was quite a beautiful building with large windows and cool concrete structures. Unfortunately said famous architect didn’t take in account of the stingy nature of it’s inhabitants. We weren’t allowed to turn on heating for our lab, so in the dead of winter I would put on gloves, wrap my blanket around my jacket, and shiver as I typed on my laptop.

The road to Aobayama from Kawauchi Campus (we’re going the opposite way)

So after working in the lab, usually for about three hours, I would start heading home. If I missed the campus shuttle back down, it usually meant I had to walk down the mountain, which is so much better than walking up the mountain, it doesn't really warrant that much complaining. I would pick my bike up at Kawauchi Campus and then bike back home.

My humble abode.

This is my room, I wasn't really expecting such a bombastic place when I was applying to housing here. I had a balcony and a bathroom that had it's own bathtub. Unfortunately when winter hit I had to keep the curtains closed most of the time since it would get freezing otherwise. On the lower right hand side you'll see a book (which is actually 101 folktales) which currently I'm making an effort to read every night before I go to sleep.

Tuesdays/Fridays:

On tuesdays and fridays I didn't have Japanese class first thing in the morning so I would go to lab first thing in the morning instead. Luckily the University had a shuttle from the dorms to Aobayama Campus (which they were canceling the semester after I left). There would be a long line starting from 20 minutes before the busses came of people trying to get luck and grab a seat.

The campus bus pulling in to take all the international students to school!

I would usually try to get there early so I could grab one of the few seats and get an extra thirty minutes of sleep on the bus. The rest of the bus was standing room only but it was crazy how many people these busses could fit. There was no such thing as "the bus is full" people kept squishing in one after another until personal space was definitely not a thing.

After getting to Aobayama Campus I would go to the campus bookstore/convenience store to go buy myself lunch for later. I would usually try a different flavor of onigiri each time, but I think I eventually settled on salmon flavor as my favorite.

An artsy exterior shot of the Architecture Building.

I was looking through my photos when I realized that I really didn’t take any pictures of the interior of the lab (luckily I videotaped everything so all is not lost). I knew it was normal in Asia to take off your shoes before entering someone’s house but what I didn’t know was that also extended itself to places like your lab. So before going in you would have to remove your shoes and leave it outside the door. As a result you could pretty much tell who was in the lab at any given time based on what shoes were left out.

At around noon I would hop on another campus bus which would take me to the botanical gardens. I had always meant to actually go and check it out but in the end never did, I suppose that's just the dangers of putting things off. From the botanical gardens I would make my way to the Sendai International Center, where a bunch of volunteers from Nihongo No Mori volunteered their time to talk to clumsy awkward foreigners like me.

Their super adorable sign post.

I really had a blast there, and it was really quite amazing how much progress I made from the first week I went to the very last week. I remember the very first week I was paired with this really chill looking old man who pointed at pictures of sushi with me as I tried to vocalize my deep intense feelings on raw fish. As I went more frequently the regular volunteers would start to recognize me and they would ask me about my week as I would attempt to tell them stories about my victories getting lucky bags from the New Year's Sales. Of the places in Sendai I miss the most, it's this classroom full of wonderful people who would spend their spare time talking to people like me.

After class it would be around 3pm in the afternoon and I would head back home. This particular day I had missed the campus shuttle that would drop me off closer to the dorms, so I had something closer to an hour long walk.

The Sendai International Center Station.

During my time in Sendai, there was actually a new subway station that opened up. It was kind of expensive in that going a single station would cost you about 200 yen and the fare would only go up as you went further along the line. I walked through it a lot on the way home.

There's a river along the way home. I don't think I ever learned the name but it was a really scenic place. It was here where we had an "imonikai" which is a seasonal party that people have in Sendai during the fall.

The river where we had the imonikai.

At the imonikai we would eat this realy awesome soup with imoni (some kind of potato) in it. I made a few friends at here.

Just chillin' and eating imoni.

Anyway back to walking home. The area I lived in, Sanjomachi, had a lot of buddhist temples. And in Japan buddhist temples usually had graveyards attached, so as a result there were also a lot of graveyard in my neighborhood. In one of the graveyards there was a particularly beautiful persimmon tree that I would always walk past. The bright orange always stuck out in stark contrast against the gray in both the concrete and the sky. 

The persimmon tree near my house.

I was also struck by the number of flower shops in Japan. There would be three flower shops on the same side of the road just meters away from each other. I always wondered how they managed to get enough business to stay afloat, then one day my friend explained, it's because there are a lot of graveyards here. Ohhhhhhhhh.

A little ways after this and we're back home at my dorm. That was pretty much how most of my weekdays would go.

Side Story: leaving Japan

This winter while I was in Japan was an unusually warm winter, snow would unfailingly melt within a few hours. This was a good thing since I didn't bring a winter coat and also biking was a super important method of transportation.

On the day I was leaving I was going to wake up at 6am and then the taxi driver would pick me up at 7am to take me to the airport. So I woke up at 6am, groggily went into my bathroom, and while I was sitting on the toilet I hear this sound. 

*beep* *beep* *beep*

I was honestly kind of afraid, I've never ever heard this sound before. I got up.

*beep* *beep* *beep*

The phone intercom system that I had never ever used before was ringing. I picked it up.

It turns out it was the taxi driver. He explained really quickly that it was blizzarding outside and that if I wanted to have a chance at getting to the airport on time he was going to pick me up in 20 minutes...

I threw open the windows!!!! And oh my god it was snowing. All the last minute packing that I was suppose to have way more time to do...uh oh. I rushed down the staircase with all of my luggage, basically my life, everything I would take back to the U.S., along with the router I rented during the time and said goodbye to the security guard for the very last time.

The view from inside my taxi looking up at my dorm.

I hopped into the taxi, there wasn't enough time to be sentimental. We then took off at a slow crawl towards the Sendai Airport. 

[Japan 2015] Rebuilding Japan: 5 years after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake & Tsunami

Looking out from the shrine in Yuriage, Japan

I’ve experienced three earthquakes (that I’m aware of) in my life, two of them happen to be during my short stay in Sendai City, Japan. They weren’t a big deal. The first one happened while I was taking a cat nap, at first I actually thought that my leg was twitching, but then it grew a little stronger and my clothes hanging on their hangers swayed side to side. The second one happened during a lab seminar. Someone said “地震でしょう”, “It’s probably an earthquake”, and we sat around the conference table in silence until the trembling stopped. So by now I’m pretty convinced that earthquakes are a common phenomenon here, but I’m going to focus this post primarily on the big one that happened a few years ago.

So it’s coming close to 5 years since the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake & Tsunami has happened. It was a magnitude 9 Earthquake that happened in the sea that primarily affected North Eastern Japan in the Iwate, Miyagi, and Fukushima prefectures. If you guys rewind your brains a little further back you’ll probably remember that this was the disaster that caused a nuclear meltdown in Fukushima, but mainly I’m going to talk about the event in the context of the places I’ve visited which is primarily in Miyagi.

A map of Miyagi prefectures and the places I’m going to go into more detail later

The Tohoku Earthquake & Tsunami was one of the most devastating tragedies in modern Japanese history with about ~16000 deaths, costing trillions of yens in damages. The earthquake wasn’t too terrible by itself, but the tsunami it triggered was the primary cause of all the lives and properties lost.

At its highest the tsunami was recorded to be around 40 meters tall, which is kind of like if you had a 13 story building rush in towards you from the sea. The tsunami enveloped these coastal cities, sweeping away entire houses and the people inside them. Those houses then traveled, crashing into other houses, sweeping away more people, and when the tsunami finally traveled far enough inland, it receded, bringing the debri back into the sea, barraging the already beat up landscape from the other side. Since waves naturally ebb and flow, the “tsunami” isn’t a singular event but a cycle of destruction that happened several times before damping out.

If you live near the sea, one of the first steps people tell you to take after a major earthquake is to evacuate to higher ground. Lulled into a false sense of security by inundation maps created from past tsunami data marking their houses in the “safe zones” some people didn’t evacuate; some people found out that the second floor of their house was not high enough much too late; some houses were not strong enough to withstand the tidal wave. In the coastal areas of Tohoku there were entire communities that were wiped out.

Where I live in central Sendai there aren’t many remnants of the 2011 earthquake. Perhaps it’s more obvious to the locals who have seen the before and after but for me the only thing I’ve been here for is the repaving of the road leading up to the engineering campus.

That excavator there was rolling that ball of twigs around, and I thought it was funny

Other than that, on the 5th floor of the architecture building there are a bunch of tiny strips of masking tapes pointing to small cracks on the floor. Not sure how the cracks formed and not sure exactly why they're marked, maybe part of someone’s research project.

They’re seriously all over the place!

Temporary housing units in Sendai, most of them seemed vacant when we visited

Since the disaster destroyed so many houses, displacing so many people, the Japanese government erected many temporary houses in various parts of the Tohoku region. People could live in these houses for free while they picked their lives off the ground and saved money to either buy or build a new house. Temporary houses are kind of what they sound like, they were made to last for two years and then be torn down, but now as we’re approaching the 5th year since the disaster there are still people living in them who just can’t afford to move out. Most of these people are retired senior citizens.

Paintings on the side of some of the housing units. They brightened up the otherwise drab beige.

So I’ve had the opportunity to see some of the reconstruction in the Miyagi Area, specifically Yuriage, Ishinomaki, Onagawa, and very soon Kawaishi.

Yuriage

Yuriage sits along the shoreline and is 30 minutes south of Sendai in Natori. When we got there the place was pretty much overgrown with these straw colored reeds. Hidden within the grass, my lab mates would point to concrete foundations that were once homes as we drove down the empty road. In Yuriage we saw lines of trucks carrying dirt to reconstruction areas where they were trying to raise the level of the land so that people could rebuild their lives there. Other than the people on the reconstruction site and the people visiting the shrine there was pretty much no one.  

Looking over all the empty lots (空き地) in Yuriage

A sign I found in Yuriage, which kind of shows you their plan to raise the entire town

Ishinomaki

Standing in an area near the harbor, watching construction, it was a rainy day

Ishinomaki city was one of the cities that was hit the hardest, reporting the most number of deaths from the disaster (3000~). The first area we visited was the southern port of Ishinomaki near it’s downtown area. That place used to be a residential area, and if it was like any Japanese community I’ve seen, every square kilometer was probably packed with as many houses as they could fit.

Ganbarou Ishinomaki!

When we got there though it was completely leveled. While walking around we visited memorial area called “Ganbarou Ishinomaki” which translates to “do your best Ishinomaki” where people had planted a few flowers. There was also a tall pole that had a sign on it that said “tsunami inundation line,” you could probably stack me four times up and I would have still drowned. This place has plans to be turned into a memorial park sometime in the near future.

A still standing but vacant building

We then went further downtown and while it was much more lively than the previous area, you could still see ghost buildings that had been abandoned after the disaster. While we were there we visited the Central Ishinomaki Tohoku Earthquake & Tsunami information center where you could find pamphlets, pictures, guides, to help you understand the magnitude of the effect of  the disaster on Ishinomaki and its reconstruction plans. Since then Ishinomaki's population has been steadily sinking starting from approximately 160,000 people at the time to approximately 140,000 people now. Ishinomaki has been migrating entire communities further inland in its coastal areas. This is happening all over Japan where younger people are moving out of these smaller cities leaving the older population behind and the fear is that these cities would eventually die, not only that but Japan’s population growth is actually decreasing with a birthrate (1.4babies/woman/lifetime) that isn’t enough to equilibrate the population.

Onagawa

You can kinda see in the map all the construction going on in the area

Onagawa town is strangely situated, surrounded by Ishinomaki City bordered by the sea. The reason for that is a while back, Japan encouraged smaller cities to join together to form bigger mega cities, but Onagawa town did not want to conglomerate with its fellow cities since it had a nuclear reactor which meant that they reaped special government benefits that they didn’t want to share with a larger swatch of land.

Looking at the harbor from the Onagawa municipal hospital

We stopped in Onagawa very briefly to stop by the municipal hospital where a lot of people fled to. The hospital was situated on a 20 meter high hill, but even so the tsunami ended up flooding the first floor almost up to the second floor. The view from the hill was pretty incredible. You just see a huge swatch of reconstruction, dirt everywhere, bulldozers, flatness, of what used to be buildings, families, livelihoods.

So that’s just a brief tour of the places I’ve been to with regards to the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami. If you want to kind of see for yourself the reconstruction Google street view is pretty great. Not only can you stroll through these towns to get a sense of what I’m talking about but street view also has this feature where you can change the times the street view was taken, and for most of these places I’m talking about they have a timestamp at 2011 right after the disaster and 2014, three years after, so you can compare and contrast.

Natori 2011 Street View

Onagawa 2011 Street View

Ishinomaki 2011 Street View

12/14/2015

Going to continue writing this post. This time we’re in Kamaishi which is further north in the Iwate prefecture. I was in Kamaishi with my lab conducting a survey of the city’s current reconstruction process. Mainly we went around to every building in the main downtown area and took notes and pictures on things like if it was a vacant lot, old building, new construction, and other details regarding the architecture. It was pretty amazing, I think about ⅓ of the buildings were newly constructed since 2011. We would look at the pre-disaster map with an entire block of residential houses, and then look up to see that entire block turned into a massive parking lot.

A port in Kamaishi, the concrete thing in the front is a tsunami breakwater.

This is a temporary elementary and middle school that the kids are using until a newer one is built

Construction of the new elementary school and middle school behind the old one

So remember the part up there where I talked about temporary homes? The Japanese government is trying to move people out of these temporary homes, but some people just can’t afford it, so in order to transition people out, the government is paying for public housing to be constructed.

A completed public housing unit in Kamaishi

It’s kind of funny, all the public housing I’ve seen so far is super modern looking, but then you see the front doors open and it’s these old grandmas and grandpas living in these future abodes. This particular house in the picture above is in the countryside of Kamaishi. As Japan’s population continues to decrease, as more and more young people move away from smaller towns into larger cities, it makes me wonder, after the current residents pass away will it just leave a bunch of vacant modern looking houses in the Japanese countryside.

A comparison of what the other houses in this particular area of Kamaishi looks like

[Japan 2015] Why should I continue learning Japanese after I leave?

So the reason why I started learning Japanese a year ago was probably cause I knew I wanted to study abroad in Japan. The reason that I’m learning Japanese now is because I’m treading water, trying to keep myself from drowning in what I don’t understand. I’m now approaching the midway point of my semester abroad and it’s made me think about what my purpose would be for continuing to learn Japanese when I get home

I can’t say that I planned for that at all before I came here. If I open the excel spreadsheet containing all the classes I need to take during my four years of college, Japanese is completely missing from junior fall and the entirety of senior year. What what I’ve come to realise though is that learning a language is hard and right now I’m still on the uphill.

There’s a ton of vocabulary left to learn; I suck at understanding Japanese people when they talk; I can’t express things that are more abstract. But once I get over that hump: when I can guess a word I don’t know based on the context; when I can ask and receive explanations of things I don’t know in Japanese; then I’ll have stopped treading water and started swimming.

If I decide to not to continue Japanese after these two months are over, it’ll be an unsatisfactory end. Since I’m still running uphill, all that's left for me when I stop is to slide all the way back down. What a huge fucking waste of all the hard work I’ve put in. So I’ve decided, when I go back, I’ll continue, and one day I’ll get get over that hump and from there I can only go forward.

When I first got to Sendai, I felt pretty guilty. I’d spent some time before that in China visiting my relatives when I came to the grand realization that my Chinese sucked. When I spoke Chinese at home, it was always a mishmash of Chinglish, any word I didn’t know was smoothly substituted in by English. There was no huge disconnect between what I wanted to say and what the other person heard.

But in China it was so hard communicating all that I wanted to say, to fill my relatives in on how much I’ve changed in the years since I’ve last been there. I beat myself up a bit wondering why didn’t choose to spend a semester in China instead; why I was spending my time learning a foreign language instead of my own mother tongue.

I think we get stuck in this belief that learning languages is something that you can only do when you’re young. Kids that get taught multiple languages when they’re young do seem fare much better than their adult language learning counterpart. Increasingly we’re seeing language classes being taught in school at a younger and younger age. And somewhere along the line I’ve convinced myself that it’s already too late. That the only thing left to do is to hate my younger self for not taking Chinese school seriously enough for the rest of my life.

But being here in Japan this semester has really just motivated me to not only continue learning Japanese, but to also pick up from where I left off in Chinese. There really isn’t an expiration date on your ability to pick up new languages, and yeah it’s a long journey and you’ll constantly be wrong,  but the only thing really stopping you is yourself.

Anyway, since the longer spiel is over here’s just a few things that I’m doing right now/will continue to do in the coming future.

1. Right now I’m watching Nodame Cantabile the live action on netflix in Japanese with Japanese subtitles. For a little background, it’s a romcom about this serious dude who wants to be a world class orchestra conductor and his weird neighbor next door who’s a pianist. I’ve read the manga before in english a few years ago and it’s actually immensely entertaining as a live action. The live action doesn’t span the entire series so I’m considering trying to read the manga in Japanese. I normally speed read manga in english (16 volumes a day?), so I’m a little worried about how snailer pace would make me feel.

2. I’m doing this kanji program called wanikani. For those who don’t know kanji are the Chinese characters that Japan has over years integrated into it’s own language. It’s a  specially formulated SRS based kanji program that sells the hope of learning 2000+ kanji in a time of about two years. Which honestly sounds way too good to be true seeing that Japanese kids spend at least 6 years in school doing that. But I’m kinda hopeful, it is a subscription based program though so it’s not free, but I mean it’s promising something I would consider on par with the elixir of youth.

3. I’m going to keep playing go. Which I had the intention of anyway, but Olin’s go club hasn’t been very beginner friendly and learning oriented, so I’m going to try to change that. But I also think I want to keep playing go after college too. And when I’m an old lady I’ll be like pokémaster strong.

4. At some point when I get comfortable enough with my level of Japanese I’m going to try to connect Japanese kanji to Cantonese and Mandarin pronunciations. Granted they aren’t really one to one but all I’m really going for is to be able to read Chinese and to learn new vocabulary words.