This past weekend in Tokyo, Shoji and I went to the Asakusa district, home of the famous Myoujin Shrine. We had no idea that on the precise weekend we chose to go there would be a famous festival called Kanda Matsuri, so we arrived and the shrine area was extremely crowded with festival goers, stands selling food, and festival participants, including some playing musical instruments. There was also an unending parade of portable shrines winding through the shrine complex. This festival is held to display and carry the portable shrines with the purpose of pacifying the Shintou gods, but it also brings the community (maybe the larger community of Japan) together to celebrate.

In addition, Shoji and I went to Tokyo Tower, a famous Tokyo landmark known for its great views, to check out the Tokyo skyline. We also saw the famous Super Dry Hall (with the unique golden statue sitting atop it) on our way to the festival in the Asakusa area. This building was designed by a French architect and belongs to Japan's popular Asahi Beer Company.

I have added some pictures from my recent travels, so please check out this blog entry and other recent entries to see various photos!

This past Monday and Tuesday I toured many shrines and temples in Kamakura and in Tokyo. I went with a family friend whom I had just met for the first time. He married a Japanese woman and is living in Tokyo doing work as a translator.

In Kamakura I saw a giant Buddha (it was a very tall statue, and I was able to enter the statue and see the inside as well). In Tokyo I went to the controversial Yasukuni Shrine where war criminals and other personages from World War II are enshrined.

After returning from Okinawa, the next day my program held a farewell party for all of us foreign exchange students. There was a nice lunch, speeches by several students and important people from Konan University, and a few musical performances (I performed a piece on the violin). The very same day I took the Shinkansen (bullet train) to Tokyo. I have since spent the past few days meeting up with various friends and sightseeing in the Tokyo area. If you recall my earlier blog entry about maid cafes, well, I wanted to see how things really are, so on Sunday afternoon I headed to a maid cafe in Akihabara. Many people go to maid cafes, but some of the regular customers are unmarried, working men who have a lot of money and no wife and children on which to spend their money. In addition, however, there were many women customers waiting in line at the maid cafe my friends and I picked out. The maids were dressed not in a sexy manner but in a cute manner, with their bodies were well covered. We had some maids welcome us to the cafe, take our order, and bring us drinks, but aside from that, the interaction was limited. As in most cases, the more interaction one wants to receive, the more money one must pay, so my friends and I resigned ourselves to watching the maids interact with other customers who were willing to pay more money for conversation, drinks, and food. One rather alarming part of the visit was the sign posted in Japanese at the entrance of the restaurant. The sign included a list of actions that were prohibited for customers of the maid cafe. Some of the actions included: 1) Asking the maid what her working shift hours are 2) Taking pictures of the maid with your cell phone, camera, etc. 3) Asking the maid for her contact information 4) Waiting outside the cafe for the maid to arrive or leave work 5) Following the maid home from work, or any other stalker-like behavior These prohibitions suggest that this sort of behavior is rampant within this line of work. Although the pay is good, I wonder why the women who work as maids put up with these sorts of work-related risks.

This past week I took my first trip to Okinawa. Naha, the biggest city on Okinawa's main island, is filled with buildings and is very crowded. Even though most of the buildings were constructed after World War II, in general the city's buildings looked rather old and worn. Also, Okinawa seems to be missing some of the wealth that is characteristic of Japan thanks to its strong economy and the economic bubble that occurred in the 1980s.

I went with my host mother from four years ago who lives in Chiba city, and once we drove out of Naha and up north, the scenery turned to subtropical plants, sandy white beaches, and the beautiful aquamarine-colored sea. In addition to doing a lot of sightseeing at historical places such as two castles, I also spent a day doing marine sports on a small island to the northwest of Okinawa's main island. I tried parasailing and went up forty-five meters above the ocean for a stunning view of the surrounding islands and ocean.

On the last day I met my former host mother's friend, who is Okinawan (Okinawans are different from Japanese, as Okinawa was formerly its own country), and we saw a traditional Okinawan dance performance. Many people living in Okinawa can do what's called a finger whistle, where you place your thumb and index finger in your mouth and blow to create a whistling sound. I had some of the dancers teach me the technique after the performance, but I'm still unable to do the finger whistle. My host mom, her friend, and I also discussed the situation of the American military bases in Okinawa, but of course opinions are very divided. It seems that some Japanese still want United States bases in Japan to help protect Japan since it does not have its own military, but right now all of the bases are in Okinawa, so people are suggesting that some of the bases be moved to other areas of Japan. However, no one will volunteer their own area for a military base, so nothing's being done yet.

I recently completed two essays, one for each of my Japanese Culture Studies courses. I'll give a brief summary of each essay in order to provide an example of what I've studied in both courses.

For my Society and Law course, I wrote about the drive for gender equality here in Japan. I looked at it from a legal point of view: what laws have been passed, and how progress toward making the law into reality is measured. As recently as 1999 Japan passed a law laying down its basic standards for a gender equal society and how it wanted to achieve those goals. The law emphasized combined efforts from national, prefectural, and local governments, as well as assistance from foreign countries that already have a established a standard of gender equality. After ten years, a cabinet office dealing with gender equality conducted a survey and other research to see how close the country is to realizing the ideals of the '99 law, but progress is slow. Since this was not a research paper, I did not come up with an actual thesis and prove it, but I'm thinking that Japanese society in general does want gender equality, it will just take time and conscious effort to change social practices and citizens' attitudes.

In my Literature course, we spent a lot of time discussing how women were portrayed in Japanese literature. They are often sacrificial characters that die to save a male character, or they are portrayed as helpless and at the mercy of an overbearing, power-hungry male character. However, the two women in the stories I chose to compare and contrast in my essay were both temptresses and full of evil passions, endangering the piety of the monks whom they encountered in the stories. In one of the stories, the monk is seduced by the woman, but when he breaks his promise to marry her, she turns into an poisonous snake and kills him. In the other story, the monk is just about to return to the woman's cottage and renounce his religious vows in order to be with the woman when he meets an old man who talks him out of his rash decision. At any rate, women are not often portrayed with much power in old Japanese literature, but if they do have power, they seem to often use it in a terrible way.

My year in Japan is winding down, and it's impossible to not be reminded of it every day. There are many tasks for me to take care of before I return home, but in doing many of them, I am reminded of how much I have improved my language skills and cultural knowledge this past year.

I went to the city ward a few weeks ago to file a cancellation form for my health insurance. I was able to negotiate the entire affair using only in Japanese. When I think back to the beginning of the year, I went to the city ward with Okaasan, and she filled out all the necessary forms and negotiated everything for me when setting up my health insurance, so being able to do this on my own is a huge accomplishment.

On Friday morning I took my final two Japanese language class examinations. After those examinations were completed, I had finished my final Japanese language class! It was so easy to improve my Japanese here because I was able to study the language intensively for two hours every day in a classroom setting. I have realized after being here that it bothers me when people try to speak to me in English just because I look like it is my native language. But in the United States, I constantly approached people who spoke Spanish or Japanese and tried to converse with them. I wonder if that bothered those people. As much as I like to speak foreign languages, maybe I should save my conversation attempts for language classes and language group meetings, as opposed to speaking it with any person I meet on campus or around town.

At my school's international student office, I saw for the first time yet another difference in United States and Japanese culture. I told the administrator that I would be traveling to Okinawa next week, and she wanted me to keep my student ID card to use for discount purposes. But then when deciding when I should hand it into the office to be voided, she had to confer with another office personnel, who then got another two staff members involved in the conversation. It turned into a giant affair with many of the office staff conferring together in order to decide when I should turn in my student ID card. If this had take place in the United States, one person would have decided and informed the others later of her decision. But in Japan, everyone decides and approves of a plan together.

Yakushima and Tanegashima

I just returned to Kobe after a wonderful trip to Yaku Island and Tanega Island, two islands which are part of Kyushuu and located an hour south of Kyushu's southern-most tip. Today is the last day of Golden Week, an annual five-day long holiday which occurs every year at the beginning of May. Roads, buses, and hotels were crowded because everyone has time off during Golden Week, and most people decided to travel. Some people, my host family for example, decided to avoid the crowds and stay in their hometowns during Golden Week, but my host family also said they noticed an increase in traffic and people in Kobe due to everyone taking vacations.

Yakushima and Tanegashima are very different from Kobe in terms of climate, especially because they are further south. Yakushima has a lot of very tall, forested mountains, and it receives a lot of rain. Yakushima is famous for its giant cedar trees, some of which are thousands of years old. I went hiking in the mountains and saw a good number of them. I also saw wild deer and monkeys during my stay on the island.

Since Yakushima was very crowded and it was hard to find a place to stay, I cut my visit there short and made my way over to Tanegashima, which is one hour away by hydrofoil boat. Tanegashima was much less crowded, and it was very beautiful as well. It has a lot of tropical-looking plants, and it has two claims to fame. It has Japan's space center from which Japan launches rockets and space crafts, and Tanegashima was the place where weapons were introduced to Japan when the Portuguese arrived at the southern tip of the island in 1543. I went down to the southern tip of the island to see the point where the Portuguese landed, and I also went swimming at a beautiful beach near the space center. The following day, I went up to the northern part of Tanegashima to Urata beach, and I went on my first scuba dive!!! It was challenging, but I had so much fun, and I saw some incredible fish. The instructor stayed by me the entire time, guiding me, telling me when to remove the air from my ears, and changing the air pressure in my vest. I received the entire explanation of how to scuba dive in Japanese, so I'm really proud of my progress in being able to understand the explanation, follow the rules, and have a successful dive.

This morning I arrived in Kobe, and since I have Japanese language final exams during the next two days, it's back to work!