Adventures in Sunrise Land

Hi, I'm Delaney, a Canadian student currently on a 9 month long exchange in Osaka, Japan. This blog is a chronicle of my travels, which basically means that it's a chronicle of all the stupid stuff I've already done and will eventually do.

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Only in Japan does Delaney start studying two weeks before a test with the overwhelming sense of panic that I won't know enough come test day. My next midterm is mostly kanji (Chinese characters). I am AWFUL at kanji. It's gotten to the point where my listening and speaking have gotten better than my reading and writing (mostly because I know like 20 kanji MAYBE) and I never thought I would see that day. Meanwhile in Canada I would study for maybe a couple hours a few days before something big like a provincial exam and go "yeah I'm fine this is good."

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Today I also learned how to tell my boyfriend not to cheat on me and how to say that I don't think something is very good without being mean about it. My Japanese lessons are not serious at all because my teacher has a really good sense of humor and we kind of wind up wandering between topics and learning new words before we go along. I mean, I'm not going to commit arson, I don't have a boyfriend, and I'm not afraid to say something sucks, so some of this stuff is a little bit arbitrary. It sure is fun, though.

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Alternatively if I want to commit arson and tell the police it was an accident, I can say this: 私のいえをもえた。。。何故わからない！ --> watashi no ie moeta... Naze wakaranai! --> my house burned down... I don't know how!

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Today I learned how to say "I burned my house down" in Japanese, so I guess that's... Something. 私のいえもやした！ --> watashi no ie moyashita! --> I burned my house! Now if I decide to commit arson I can gleefully tell the police what I did!

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Selfie on the subway 🚇🇯🇵

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The weather is finally starting to get cooler which is great because Japanese humidity ruined my skin and also I love autumn.

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Might get a day off thanks to the rain!!! Well I'm sure hoping, anyways. Maybe this time the typhoon will ACTUALLY HAPPEN??

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Today was Appreciating the Aged Day here in Japan. My dad thought it was really great that I decided to skype him on the old people holiday. We did not have dinner with Obaachan (grandma) and Ojiichan (grandpa) today which struck me as a little funny but my host mom made cabbage rolls and my canadian grandma makes those a lot so it was like the same thing.

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Fun fact: Literally EVERY TIME something strange or weird is showcased on the infinite number of Japanese variety shows, the X-files theme is played. I can't count how many times I've heard it proceeding weird mysteries or strange stories. They also really like to use high powered movie themes like the Pacific Rim main theme when something ~super cool~ happens. Japanese TV is so hilariously over the top that I can enjoy it even though I don't understand what's going on all the time.

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Finally. Bunkasai is over. Well it's not actually over. I have go to in tomorrow, on my SUNDAY OFF, even though I'm not dancing, for whatever stupid reason. But I don't have to dance anymore. Sure, this was a valuable learning experience, but it hurt to see these teenage girls being torn to bits by people who don't know anything about dancing for not being like professionally trained dancers. Overall, I think that it's wrong to force the students to participate in something like this en masse. It cut MASSIVE dents into everyone's learning time and I'm sure we'll be paying for it later, and most of us were miserable for more than half the time because we didn't want to do it. The constant criticisms went to the point that everyone thinks their own performance was horrible and that every other class did a thousand times better. Nobody is really proud of what they did thanks to the way this festival was run. In the end, I suppose it wasn't a complete waste of time, because nothing is a waste if you learn something from it. It goes without saying that sometimes you aren't always going to learn nice things. I don't think I've learned anything NICE from this Bunkasai ordeal. Plus I have a leg injury now. I don't know how it happened, or what the problem is, or where it actually originates, but my left leg just won't stop throbbing and it's been getting worse by the day. I'll see how it is in the next week or so now that I don't have to do any dancing.

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A collection of bad pre-rehearsal selfies featuring my classmates, all of whom are adorable.

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Let's Talk About Group Harmony, Bunkasai, and Why I'm Absolutely Miserable

Fun fact of the day: Japan is not all sunshine and lollipops and rainbows. I've been posting about the ~fun~ stuff and not the "please hit me with a nuclear missile" stuff and I think it's time to break that trend because I'm tired of pretending that every day is a unicorn parade. Unfortunately pretending that every day is a unicorn parade is kind of ingrained in Japanese people. Why? The concept of 和. 和 - wa, which means a number of things. The most important meaning, and the meaning that we're discussing now, is "group harmony." 和 has a long history dating back to the seventh century, but the tldr explanation is essentially this: the good of society is more important than the good of the individual. This idea is one of the things that radically separates Japanese culture from that of Western culture. Now sure, group harmony sounds GREAT on the surface. Everybody being harmonious and zen and getting along? Where do I sign up? You do not want to sign up for 和. 和 is why none of my classmates know how to brainstorm or share their own opinions. 和 is why students at my school here are sometimes marked lower on tests than their actual score was in order to make school seem difficult enough. 和 is why the Japanese police force people to confess to crimes that never occurred to keep high conviction rates up. "Group Harmony" essentially requires you to shut up and go along with whatever the people above you and around you are doing. No Japanese person will EVER correct a superior or a teacher even if it's pretty freaking obvious to an outsider that a mistake was made because superiors are believed to always be right. And being a stubborn white girl who likes to argue, this idea is driving me up the wall and back again. Now, where does the mysterious Bunkasai tie in with this mess? Bunkasai (culture festival) is why I'm stuck at school until six or seven at night every day doing dance practices. Bunkasai is why I've been crying in class. I'm exhausted. Everyone save for the three or for people who want to dance is. But thanks to good old group harmony, nobody is saying a damn word about it. One of the teachers here got married over the summer. She can't go home to spend time with her new husband because she has to stay late and supervise her class' practices. If she complains to the school about this and expressed discontent with the system, she'll likely lose her job. My JSL teacher admitted that he strongly disagrees with forcing the students here to dance, but he also admitted that he would never speak against it to his bosses. He's actually considered a "bad teacher" here because he puts the freedom and personal time of himself and his family before the workplace. All thanks to the concept of group harmony, the majority of people at my school including yours truly are miserable, but no one will say a word and instead we all suffer in silence and pretend everything is great. People are crying, they're not sleeping, they're not eating. The other girl who came from Canada with me has dark circles so bad that it looks like someone punched both her eyes in. I literally cannot count the number of times I almost fainted during practice today. And what can I do to change it? Jack all. One of these days I'm going to get injured. I'm so tired I can hardly stand up straight. I'll fall down a flight of stairs or pass out and not get up. If I'm fine the next day they'll just make me practice again. The worst part is that all of this is for one singular performance that our families won't even see. More hours of practice in two weeks than I've devoted to studying in my entire lifetime, for five minutes this Saturday. Yes, it's just two weeks. Yes, there's only five days left. But I'm not going to forget getting so dizzy that I almost throw up and then being told to keep going. I'm not going to forget the teacher in crocs telling us that we'd be good if we were elementary schoolers and the girl behind me bursting into tears. I won't forget my homeroom teacher stuttering later as he told us that he disagreed with what the teacher (with no dancing experience) said. It might be just two weeks out of nine months, but it's left a sour taste in my mouth, the same way every time a train has been delayed has. The trains here are only delayed for accidents, and the only accidents are suicides. The people who have jumped in front of the trains likely never said anything due to group harmony. The people who wind up late to work because someone died don't care about anything but being late thanks to group harmony. How many more times do fifteen year old girls have to break down crying because a teacher with no dance experience told them they aren't as good as professional dancers? How many more times do I have to wonder about the person who died when my train is delayed? How long is it going to be before somebody realizes that 和 isn't working for anyone?

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Urine tests are mandatory for all Japanese students as a part of their health check thing that they have to do at the beginning of the year. This is an old story from right after I switched host families at the beginning of May. I was about to leave for the clinic to go get said urine test done. "Wait a second," I said to my host mom. I went to the bathroom, washed my hands, and then put my shoes on. Only as I was walking out the door did I realize that I had just gone pee and was leaving to go take a PEE TEST. I lied and told everyone I was too embarrassed to pee in a cup because I'd never done it before instead of the truth, which is: I'm really stupid. Nobody knows except the entirety of the Internet. Sssssh. It's a secret.

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I wanted to go inside this cool pagoda temple thing at Miyajima but I got too distracted by all the other cool stuff to think about asking so here's a picture of it instead. I didn't even stop walking to take it which proves that my iPhone 4s camera skills are amazing.

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Let's Talk About the Time I Got Hit By a Car

Read this blog's description. It says that this blog is a chronicle of my idiocy, right? Well. Here we go. Let's talk about some real idiocy. I got hit by a car waaaay back in April when I was still with my first host family and rode a bike to and from school every day. In my defense, the location where it happened had bad visibility. I couldn't look both ways without being in the road because there was a train rail bridge thing overhead. I didn't hear the car coming because there was a train passing by. Plus I may or may not have had headphones in. The world may never know. The car hit me (and my bike). I moved like, an inch to the left (I don't really remember). Then I was too embarrassed to even look at who hit me so I just kept biking and went to school without really thinking about it. Ta-da. There's your daily helping of Delaney's idiocy. Clearly I am intelligent and sound of mind. 10/10 human specimen. Perfect example of human excellence.

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My host brother just ate five rice balls and three mandarin oranges along with the udon noodles we had for dinner somebody stop this boy.

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I just got told off for dripping water all over the bathroom floor and was advised to wring my hair out in the sink after having a shower. I did that, twice, I swear. I just forgot to wipe the water that drips anyways because I was previously told to be fast getting in and out of the bathroom. One time my host parents thought the roof was leaking and really it was just my fresh-out-of-the-shower hair dripping all over the place. It's not my fault that my curly white girl hair retains water like a sponge and Japanese hair is dry in no time at all...