Sure You Just Don’t Want My Firstborn?

Spring has finally, finally, finally properly arrived in Aomori. The first of the cherry blossoms have begun to open, I haven’t turned on my heater in more than three weeks, and there’s no danger of freezing any extremities when I run at 5:45 in the morning.

Spring also means that a whole new host of fruit has shown up in the produce section of my grocery store…including very expensive watermelon. Ten USD for a tiny one, fifteen bucks for a medium, and nearly twenty-five dollars for a “large.” My wallet cringes at the mere thought of coughing up that much dough.

In my previous American life, I worked on a produce farm for nine straight summers. Our watermelons were huge, the smallest probably weighing in at the same weight as the largest here…and I don’t remember ever selling them for more than about six dollars. My living expenses here are laughably, ridiculously low (Case in point: all of my bills for the past month totaled just over $260.), but once in a while, I happen upon something that totally flips that scenario.

Watermelons are a prime example. The weather needs to be a tad bit more summery before I indulge, I think.

My New Vocabulary Word for the Day Is…

Sometimes studying Japanese involves meticulously memorizing kanji, poring over textbooks, and pulling my hair out in frustration. And sometimes my Japanese lessons consist of the math teacher drawing doodles on the back of school memos and teaching me the words for them.

Guess which lessons stick more firmly in my head?

Everything and Nothing Is Exotic

When I wrote this post, the subject of exoticism really stuck in my head. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I could apply it to travel and how our perceptions, including our opinion of what is and is not exotic, are changed through it. This post was borne out of that thought process; though it shares a few paragraphs with my previous piece on exoticism, the theme and commentary within it is much more travel-centric. It also appears here on Matador Network.

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To be exotic is to be desirable. Those who travel, I think, understand that better than most people. When we plan our travels, we never yearn for a place familiar or known. We want somewhere alien, mysterious, and foreign. We want new. There’s a reason travelers flock to locations with black-sand beaches and volcanoes on the horizon, with foods we’d never find at home, or with languages that make us trip over our own tongues. We gorge ourselves on the unusual. When faced with an exotic experience, we can’t help but be reminded of just how far away we are from home. (And for travelers, that’s a good thing.)

Living in the Land of かわいい

Surprisingly, I’ve almost never made mention of the “cuteness” of Japanese society in the ten months that I’ve had this blog. One of the first words that a foreigner almost always learns to describe Japanese culture is かわいい (kawaii). It means “cute,” and it’s a word that I hear almost every day, whether it’s my students describing the charms dangling from my cell phone or I say it myself when greeted with an adorable drawing that accompanies an essay homework.

(I also learned pretty quickly that when you’re first learning Japanese, かわいい and 怖い [kowai] can sound pretty similar. One means ‘cute’…one means ‘frightening.’ I’m pretty sure I told more than one student that I thought their Pikachu-adorned pencil case was scary.)

This was one of the first drawings I got when I started teaching. It still makes me smile.

On Being the Exotic One

In America, I do not stand out. In a country that has prided itself on being a “melting pot” for many years, the vast spectrum of skin tones, hair and eye colors, heights, and weights means that I am just another blue-eyed, dirty blonde-haired, slightly tall, average-framed, pale-skinned woman. There are thousands more like me. It’s an interesting oxymoron: because everyone is so different, your defining attributes largely go unnoticed. I am the opposite of exotic. I am vanilla.

Into the Lion’s Den (Sort Of)

Work this week has been a bit of a whirlwind. With the new teachers settling in, administrative and departmental meetings have been a daily occurrence. While I technically have to attend, I basically do nothing except sit in the back, busy myself with either making travel plans for the upcoming year or brainstorming bachelorette party ideas for my best friend’s wedding next month (both of which ensure that I look appropriately attentive), and laugh when everyone else does. There are worse ways to spend a day in the office.

The best part of my week, though, was when my school principal, O-sensei (Sorry, privacy means that you don’t get more than his first initial!) invited me over to his house for dinner. He’d been promising to have me to his house since he’d arrived at Aomori High School last year, but, as it tends to do, life got in the way. But he finally made good on his offer, and so on Tuesday after work, we meandered on over to his house, where his wife had dinner waiting for us. In a country where I am taller than roughly 95 percent of the population, O-sensei kind of scares the hell out of me. Part of that has to do with the fact that he’s my boss, but part of it also is because he towers over me at roughly two meters (or 6’5”). Don’t get me wrong, he’s one of the nicest people I’ve met while in Japan, but I still get a bit nervous when speaking Japanese to him. Because Japanese has different forms that depend on your hierarchal relationship with the person to whom you’re speaking, I’m constantly worried that I’ll inadvertently offend him and then lack the language skills to dig myself out of that hole. “Dread” is far too strong a word to define the emotion I was feeling, but suffice to say that I was more than a little どぎまぎ in the hours leading up to dinner.