Busy Day 1

They have sure kept us busy here, with very little time to get on the internet!

Well, the flight was incredibly long, and believe it or not, I could only sleep for 1 hour.

The first night after settling into our hotel, we were broken up into groups of three to four to go out to dinner with a local college student who spoke english. Our "leader" was Hanamae, and she had just gotten back to Tokyo from Oregon State.

We ended up at this cool little noodle bar for dinner. It was very different as you didn't order through a waitress, but through a vending machine! The buttons were all Japanese, so Haname helped us. I ended up going for a bowl of soba noodles and pork. After I put my money into the vending machine and pressed the button, a little ticket came out. You give that ticket to the waitress, who then gives it to the cook. Then we went to sit down on these short wooden stools, with no back to them. When the food was ready, it was brought to you. I liked the noodles and soup, but the pork in it was actually about 4 inch around slices - very hard to cut with chopsticks! But after watching Hanamae, I realized you don't have to cut the pork, you just bring it up to your mouth and bite off a piece! Another thing I noticed the first night were all the business men coming home from work in their black suits...everyone in black suits! It is the "official" uniform of the white collar worker here in Japan. As these men sat at the noodle bar, we walked in and all I could here was this hissing noise - it ended up being the Japanese slurping their soup and noodles. This is not considered bad manners here in Nippon.

After that first dinner we headed back to the hotel, upon our arrival, I wanted our little dinner group to take a photo in front of the hotel with Tokyo tower in the background. So I asked a group of Asian men if they would take our photo, and they kindly did. Feeling rather bold at this moment I used my first Japanese phrase to thank them "Domo arigato". They all started laughing uncontrollably at me! I couldn't believe it!! Did I not pronounce it correctly? I was going by that 80s song lyric that says "Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto" as a guide. I asked Hanamae if I said it incorrectly and was that why they were laughing at me. She told me I said it perfectly, it was just that those men who took our picture were Korean.

Wow. That so far has made the greatest impact on me with this trip. For all the years I have taught geography, and on the topic of talking about different Asian countries, I have always wanted the students to completely understand that each country is very different from other countries, and even different within one country. Often I would hear from students something to the following:
Me: Can you tell me something about Japan?
Student: They have the Great Wall of China.
Me: Sorry, that would be in China :)
Student: Well, same difference.

That line "same difference" ALWAYS bothers me, and I try to explain to the students there are indeed differences...it is almost a campaign of mine to create a more sensitive cultural awareness in our students. We can look at these differences from the U.S. perspective through our textbooks and teachers at one level. Even though I am constantly conscious of this while teaching in the classroom, to be immersed into a culture where I can not tell the differences between nationalities, (as I am not exposed to this on a daily basis in the Upper Midwest) and regardless of my own cultural , "awareness" I unconciously did exactly what I have been teaching my students for YEARS not to do....unconciously or conciously think that every Asian I see in Japan is Japanese. This has made it very difficult to communicate in a language I barely know. Another example, and I will leave this topic. I did the exact same thing in the hotel elevator in Tokyo to someone who appeared to be of European/USA descent...I started rambling off in English about how great Tokyo is and asked them what they are doing here while in Japan. After looking at the person for a while, he shook his head no and said something to the effect of I don't speak English and "Sprechen zie Duetsch".

Some other things I have noticed and that surprises me:
* It is incredibly quiet everywhere you go-subways, restaurants, stores, tourist attractions. The Japanese are a soft-spoken culture, it is eerie almost. You get to a similar situation in NYC and it is incredibly LOUD!
*It is not culturally acceptable to eat or drink while walking around outside, but there are vending machines for everything imaginable, outside, about every block!
*You can watch groups of Japanese and figure out who the "head" person is by how low everyone bows to eachother.
*The Japanese are a very polite and curteous society, and their actions show how humble they are on the outside to other people.
*Everything is incredibly expensive!

As I said before, I am trying to get the pictures off my camera onto the computer and will add them ASAP from the 4G memory card. I ended up buying a new card last night, and that seems to work, so I will have a few phots of my hotel room on the Google Groups and here. I have two more days to catch up for blogging and hope to get that done later today. I am off to Nikko for a short day trip tomorrow - our only free day.

KW