9.24.03
So the secret's out: the Japanese know I'm here and they built me a square to celebrate it. For those of you who don't know, Tengu are the mythical long-nosed red-headed demons that Japanese always thought Westerners reminded them of. They're supposed to look... well, like that photo. I swear, it's like I'm looking in a mirror when I see that thing. This is in the middle of downtown Hiroshima, so it's hilarious to see how old myths and conceptions have persevered. It's actually a sign for an art gallery, so go figure.
Today sure was X-treme hardcore. It's a little hard to pin down what exactly was X-treme about it, but I'm quite certain that the X-treme game of doubles ping-pong I played helped. I also did a lot of X-treme walking, which is like regular walking only IN SPACE AND ON FIRE.
I was watching TV yesterday, and there was a shot of some UN gathering of world leaders. All the guys were lined up just like for a leadership class photo shoot at the end of high school. You could practically hear Kofi Annan going, "Best friends forever, guys! Never change!" That's just what he was thinking, of course; UN guys are too cool to gush like that. What he actually said was something like "And America, having won an honest and desperately needed war, owes the UN $4949393 billion trillion in damages. And 32 cases of Pocky." Of course, that probably wasn't exactly what he said - it was in Japanese and doubtless lost something in the translation.
I saw a snake in the cracks between bricks at school today. I watched as somebody poked it with a stick. It gave me a feeling of unstoppable power. Then I leveled Tokyo with my heat vision.
ENGRISH UPDATE
Sorry these haven't been as forthcoming as I may have earlier promised. There's a lot of little poems and such on various products that are hilarious to read but not really funny enough to post up here. Naturally everything is misspelled, like the tobacco shop across the street billing itself "Tabacco". Interestingly enough, the idiotic and nonsensical phrasings carry over to the actual Japanese as well - for example, on a drink bottle today there was a passage that read "when it's time for fun, time for refreshment or time for relief, Calpis is the choice!" That sounds like a freaking Immodium A-D commercial, for goodness' sake.
Thanks for all the feedback on the website; it's very encouraging. If you have any suggestions as to what you'd like to see more or less of, lay them on me.
What follows is a boringly factual description of the classes that I just signed up to take. They have this weird system set up to where a given class only meets once a week, for however many hours its credits merit. As a result, you end up taking a billion classes that teach you only a little bit per the each. I am taking ten classes right now, and that only adds up to 18 credits. Classes start on Friday, incidentally. E indicates that the class is either taught in English or the readings are in English. J means all Japanese. The Japanese don't really name courses like we do, so all course names are approximated.
Monday
Japanese x2 (J, I assume)
Politics and Terrorism (J)
Tuesday
Japanese Politics (E)
The UN and War (E)
Japanese Culture and Western Contact (J)
Wednesday
Japanese lit: Haiku (E)
Japanese x2 (J?)
Friday
Japanese Culture, History and something else I can't read (E)
Hiroshima History (E)
