Listen to the Rain

On a whim, I looked up my old student Erina on Facebook, figuring that I might be able to find her since I actually remember her last name--her parents got divorced halfway through the semester, and her name went from two kanji that were easy for me to write to one kanji that was impossible for me--and she popped up as the first result.

She's also memorable to me because when I did a lesson about music genres and played the song there under "I hear," she raised her hand after it was done and said, "Na...name please." I later found out she was in a punk band with some friends.

Most of her account is locked down or unused, as is proper, but it does say that she went on to school for graphic design and her profile picture has her sitting in kimono in a Japanese garden. Good for her.

schoolpsychnerd is out of town this week visiting friends so there's no Darker than Black, but I still bring you a post about food!

The first session of the LARP I joined is coming up in a week. It's a game of Scion where I'm playing a descendant of the Japanese god Izanagi, alongside schoolpsychnerd playing a descendant of Izanami--we were looking for a pair of deities that had a pre-existing relationship and which we felt culturally competent to play--and it finally inspired me to pull the trigger and order some matcha, along with a 茶筅 (chasen, "tea whisk") and a 茶杓 (chashaku, tea scoop). I didn't order a 茶碗 (chawan, "tea bowl") because I thought we already had one. It turned out that we did, but it was given to us by a friend and is currently sitting in our display cabinet and I probably shouldn't use it until i know what I'm doing.

Well, the tea came today, so I unboxed it, made sure that everything was in good condition, did a bit of googling to figure out what the proper ratio of matcha to water was, and went to work.


Aesthetically, I get at best a D. If you google matcha, you'll notice that the example photos that aren't the raw powder all have a nice light green foam on the top, but despite my whisking I couldn't get it to foam at all. It might be because I didn't whip it enough or vigorously enough, since the bowl I picked was more for aesthetics than for ease of preparation. It might be because I didn't sift the matcha to break it up before I put it in, since if it's finer it dissolves easier and makes a better foam. Also, I found some matcha at the bottom of the bowl that hadn't been absorbed. Oops.

It terms of taste, though, it was just as good as I remember it being. Not as bitter as some of the matcha I had in Japan, which probably means that I added too much water (or too little matcha, depending on how you're counting). It was very smooth, though, and contrasted really well with the sweets I had with it. The only problem I ran into was at the bottom of the cup where there were clumps of matcha that I hadn't mixed in well enough, but that's a problem of preparation that I know how to fix. Getting the foam...hmm. That might take longer.

It's like when I did some calligraphy at the Suzugamine Culture Festival. I can write 祭 just fine, but I didn't have any of the flair that a real master 書道家 would bring to the art.



I didn't have any 和菓子 (wagashi, "Japanese sweets") and I'm not even sure where to get any without going to Mitsuwa and buying them directly from a bakery--with a quick search, yeah, looks that that's what I have to do--but the Asian grocery store down the street has a yuca and shredded coconut dessert (apparently from Malaysia?) that isn't Japanese at all but has a much more similar character to 和菓子 than, say, dark chocolate would. I alternated between bites of yuca, sips of matcha, and looking out the window, and it reminded me of how every time we'd see a sign in a temple that said "Tea and sweet," schoolpsychnerd and I would stop for a cup. And now I can make my own.

The ears on top of the tea are pretty cute, too. But I should probably buy my own tea bowl.

Warning: this post is a little First World whiny, if that bothers you.

I took a sick day today, the first since I got the flu when I was working at Suzugamine and had to take three days off. I know that conjures up bafflement from anyone reading this who's familiar with Japan's work culture, but that was when swine flu hit Japan and they took every precaution necessary, including shutting down the school for a few days to isolate everyone from everyone else. That's how I was able to do it. Anyway, I've had a cold since Monday, and today I just felt awful when I woke up. As I was lying in bed, shivering and sweating with all the covers on me, I thought, "You know, I should take the day off."

And it worked! I feel much better, I still managed to get all my steps in (just walking is fine when you're sick, and I didn't have a terrible fever or anything later), I studied Japanese, I played more Planescape Torment, and I drank a truly enormous amount of tea. The first world whining part only comes in because I don't have separate sick days, so I had to dip into my personal days that I was mostly using for vacation in order to cover today. But it's not like I'll have to cancel any days off, because I was already carrying a week over into the new year! So really I'm just annoyed for no reason.

I'm glad I feel better, though. Hopefully I still feel better tomorrow!

Last weekend was ACEN, which I've been going for nine years at this point, though admittedly not consistently. My interests have changed at this point so that I'm not really all that into anime anymore and barely know what's coming out and what's popular, but ACEN is still a great place to catch up with friends that are scattered around the country (or just out of our non-car-owning transit radius) but meet up for a weekend. Several of the people I saw actually didn't even buy con badges, they just came for the company. Honestly I might be getting to that point myself based on the panel content, but I like wandering around the dealer's room too much to just give up on officially attending. The selection is often more interesting than you can find online, probably because there's a lack of IP lawyers standing around like hawks.

And now, the daily breakdown.

Friday
I took only a half-day off from work, because I didn't think that there would be much I wanted to see in the morning and because the AMA started it's summer half-day program on the day ACEN started, fortunately. I expected that schoolpsychnerd and I would arrive at about the same time, but literally as she was walking out the door a student came in who needed immediate attention and she ended up staying much longer than she intended and not arriving at the hotel until around 5:45. Since I had assumed she would be coming around the same time as I did and because I didn't want to haul a lunchbag to and from the con and because I'm really cheap, I didn't have lunch with me and so I ended up mostly just lounging around the room Friday afternoon. I did wander down to the dealer's room and over to redpikachu's booth (Natural Pop! Made with love) to buy another cute stuffed animal. Last time it was a frog, and this time it was a corgi, and when schoolpsychnerd finally arrived I gave it to her, and, well:


So happy!
We both ate a ton of food, because schoolpsychnerd hadn't gotten to eat lunch either with all the chaos at her school so we stuffed ourselves on apples, bananas, Syrian cheese, olives, almonds, homemade beef jerky, and dark chocolate. Then we went and met fiendishfanfares's husband, who had kindly offered to let us borrow his work laptop to give our panel on Saturday, for info about which see the Saturday section. Then we went back to our room again, powered up the laptop and transferred the presentation over, and ran through it once to make sure that we would be able to pull it off. Having done that successfully and confidently, we headed down to the AMV room.

Watching the AMV contest entries is somewhat of a tradition for schoolpsychnerd and I, though it was most prevalent in 2005-2008, when we were attending multiple cons per year and could see AMVs riffing off of AMVs we had seen at previous cons (like this Azumanga Daioh AMV, made as a parody of this Evangelion AMV which aired six months previous). In 2012 ACEN didn't have any AMV Contest because of some leadership kerfuffle, and since we didn't attend in 2013, and since we hadn't gone from 2009-2011 at all due to the whole living in Japan thing, so I was curious what had become of it and...well, there was barely anything to it. I remember at Otakon they'd have the AMV Contest entry viewings in one of the auditoriums, but this year at ACEN it was in one of the small video rooms and there were never more than a couple dozen people in there at a time. We didn't even get a sheet with the AMVs listed to vote on them like I remember previously. I was glad I managed to identify a VNV Nation just by the style (it was Control, set to a racing anime called Redline), but otherwise the contest was kind of sad, and we only stayed for a bit because a friend had invited us to go to Anime Hell.

We headed over to the place where Anime Hell was supposed to play, but they weren't letting anyone stand in line yet, so we headed up to our room for a bit to wait for the signal. When we got a text, we immediately took the stairs down and walked over to the ballroom, followed the enormous line that had somehow sprung up in the last 15 minutes, and at the very moment that we reached the end of the line, staff announced that the line was closed. While standing off to the side and trying to decide what to do, we ran into stephen_poon and some other people we knew, and after a brief chat, schoolpsychnerd, stephen_poon, and I headed over to the Hyatt's lobby bar for a drink and a chat. We were there for maybe five minutes before they called last call, so after some conversation we headed over to Red Bar for a while.

After a lovely conversation about stephen_poon's trip to Spain, and about Japan with another friend who had come to visit us in 2011, and then schoolpsychnerd said our farewells and headed off to Let's Play Oregon Trail, which we'd been to previously and had a lot of fun watching. It was about an hour in, and while the players this year had done better than last time (where the panicked players had forgotten to buy any weapons and were only able to hunt because the organizers took pity on them and let them buy a pistol), they still kept trying to hunt fast-moving birds with shotguns and not having much luck. After basically everyone starved to death within 30 miles of Independence, Missouri due to chronic incompetence, we succumbed to our tiredness, went back to the room, and slept.

Saturday
We were planning to go to a panel on Chicago's Anime Scene, but we thought that it would be best if we didn't set an alarm, and we woke up just a bit too late to go, so instead we went down to the dealer's room again since schoolpsychnerd had arrived too late on Friday to go before it closed. I had seen that Do Bats Eat Cats had a space in the Artists' Alley, and after seeing their jewelry at a store near us, and now that Japan paid us and we have money, schoolpsychnerd wanted some new earrings.

After getting those, we looked around for a booth selling Japanese tableware to replace the ones we had that have broken over the year, but couldn't find anything. I had figured that somewhere would have chopsticks, or tea cups, or something, but no. The most we found some was kitschy anime mugs. I know we'll be able to get them at the Ginza Festival in August, but it would have been nice to do it now.

Then it was time for our presentation: "Seifuku and Bunkasai: Japanese Education in Anime," which was about the differences in our experience of the Japanese education system vs. how we've seen it portrayed in anime. You can download our slides here if you didn't or couldn't attend, and we have plenty of stories to tell if you want. It's always hard to judge these things, but I think it went well. A few people came up and thanked us afterward, including a guy who had just been shortlisted for JET and was leaving in July, who hadn't been sure he would learn anything in the panel and actually learned a lot, and a woman who asked us about Keion. Also, not many people left during the panel, which is a good sign.

After a break back to our room for lunch (more homemade beef jerky, apples, olives, nuts, and cheese), we went back down to the AMV room and parked in there while waiting on word from one of our friends, and then when we got a text and he was in the General Gaming room, we headed over there and played Once Upon a Time, about which you can read a review I wrote here. A few games of that finished, we went back to the dealer's room again because I wanted an 8-bit Legend of Zelda heart keychain, but while we couldn't find one of those, we found this set of magnets:

Do do do doooo!

On the way back from the dealer's room to the Hyatt, we ran into fiendishfanfares and her family, and while we had missed her daughter's cosplay, we did get to see video of her doing a kamehameha as only a toddler can. Then it was back to the AMV room to catch the re-airing of the contest videos, and while this time the freestyle videos were playing instead of the drama ones, we didn't stay that long because we hadn't eaten lunch in favor of a very large brunch, and they hadn't even handed out a voting card for the AMVs.

Dinner was at the Hyatt's restaurant, which intially looked incredibly expensive for average food, except it turned out that they had a "teriyaki buffet" for $22 that, well:


I was pleasant surprised, considering how much of a hipster foodie snob I am. They also had a dessert bar with cheesecake, which is an excellent way to my heart.

After another brief rest in the room, we headed out to a succession of room parties that lasted the rest of the night, though with one nice interruption. A friend I met in elementary school and have talked to sporadically in the years since then messaged me to let me know that he'd be in Red Bar meeting with some people he knew, and having picked up that I was at ACEN based on my Facebook posts, he asked if we wanted to meet up for a drink.

And we did, and despite all the comments I make about being aloof and having trouble with small talk and blah blah blah, we had no trouble keeping a conversation going despite not really talking in depth since middle school. He also sold us on Wizard World, and while I'm not sure we're going to make it this year due to its proximity, though we might go for the day on Saturday, but we'll certainly try to get there in the future. I've been leery of going to comic conventions, just because I know so little about comics--I had to ask schoolpsychnerd who the Avengers were--but since so much of ACEN was us talking to friends, Wizard World or the various other cons in Chicago could easily be the same thing. And maybe I'd learn something and no longer be a comic Fake Geek Guy.

After a nice conversation and a following succession of room parties and meeting with friends, we elected to skip the rave and the various events happening late at night and went to bed at 12:30.

Sunday
We woke up late and missed the panels we wanted to go to again, including one called "ACEN over 30," which I suspect was placed at 9:15 a.m. because all of us old-timers can't stay up raving until 5 a.m. like the kiddies can. But we slept past it, and after cleaning our room and checking out, we headed down to the dealer's room for one last look around and I managed to find an 8-bit heart keychain. Then we went back to the AMV room, found it was closed, and with nothing further to do and feeling pretty tired, we headed out to the Blue Line and went home.


I'm not sure I'm really the audience for ACEN anymore. I think in the last year we've watched...maybe a dozen episodes of anime, and quite possibly less, because I don't remember when we finished Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. It's not that I dislike it or anything, it's just that there's so many things competing for my attention that it tends to fall into a lower tier. I didn't even attend any panels this year other than the one that schoolpsychnerd and I presented.

Despite that, I'm probably going to still keep coming, because it's a great excuse to see people and catch up. Even if I'm not happily going to the various panels and dancing for hours, there's enough there to keep me interested. Maybe we'll even do more panels. I don't care about all the fan panels that take up a big chunk of the schedule, but living in Japan for years does give us a perspective that I suspect a lot of the attendees for ACEN wish they had.

Oh, and cosplay I liked:


Probably the most accurate Sephiroth I've ever seen. Ah, those early Playstation graphics.


Chrono Trigger is one of my favorite games, and this is one of my favorite cosplays.


I'm dorchadas and this is my favorite Mass Effect cosplay at ACEN.


I didn't actually see this guy, I just grabbed the photo from Twitter. But that's awesome.

At least, some people think so.

Tonight was the Yae-Nishi Neighborhood Talent Show, winter edition. I was originally supposed to perform an act in the summer talent show when they held it six months ago, but at that time I had caught a cold and wasn't able to sing. This time, I had no such excuse, so schoolpsychnerd and I did Scarborough Fair as a duet (with her on guitar) and then I sang Skibbereen alone. schoolpsychnerd also did a retelling of Momotarou's story in English and Japanese with the Wednesday night children's class (she read the Japanese, they read the English). Her students translated it into Hiroshima's local dialect, so all the old women in the audience got a kick out of her reading it. The rest of the acts were the standard fair--karaoke, hula dancing, traditional Japanese dancing, shamisen playing, and kagura. Basically, the same as last time. Still fun, though, and I certainly didn't do as badly as I was afraid I would.

On the work front, bad news--it turns out that Suzugamine isn't renewing its contract with Lang, so I won't be there full time starting next school year. I was initially worried it was because of my performance, but I think it's simple economics--the number of applicants to Suzugamine has fallen by almost 60% in the past 10 years (from over 1000 to down to around 400), which doesn't leave quite as much money for things like a foreign English teacher. They're going to ask the Japanese teachers to take on the primary duty for teaching the spoken English classes (which they'll hate--this year was supposed to be team teaching, but they pitched a fit and so I taught most of them alone) and have part-timers come in to help with the classes. This means that the teachers will have to plan all the lessons, explain them to the part time teachers (possibly multiple times per week, if different part-time teachers come), and then do most of the teaching. I don't expect anything good will come of it as regards the students' education, but...well, there's nothing I can do, really.

I talked with Yoshimi-sensei about it, and she told me that the younger teachers all have pretty crappy employment conditions--one year contracts that can be cut if the school doesn't get any enrollment, not many benefits, they have to teach homerooms, and so on. Meanwhile, the older teachers rake in fat paychecks for doing fuck all. No wonder Yoshimi-sensei and Arishima-sensei live with their parents. I imagine they aren't paid enough to live on their own. She and the librarian told me that it might actually be good, because I should go to a school where they're more kind (like Chiyoda, say). Next time I'll probably give her my e-mail address in case she wants to keep practicing English. She told me she kind of looks up to me, because she wants to move to America and teach gymnastics there, but her grandparents and parents want her to stay in Japan, marry a Japanese man and have babies, and keep saying that foreign countries are far too unsafe and she'll get killed if she moves. Then again, I have been asked how many guns I own more than once, so it seems that American media is doing its job. Yippie-kay-yay, motherfucker.

I haven't written an LJ entry in over a month. To think that I used to write multiple entries a day.

The Suzugamine Culture Festival went really well. schoolpsychnerd showed up and we went around and looked at the room displays, which were mostly about the trips that the different classes of students had taken (Etajima, Okinawa, and one class went to Bangladesh). The kanji writing went okay--I think that while my kanji was technically correct, it lacked artistry. schoolpsychnerd told me that the old men in the audience with her were saying stuff like "ええ、祭？すごい！" (Wow, "matsuri"? That's amazing!"), so I impressed some people at least.

Most of my students who came up to us used it as an opportunity to tell schoolpsychnerd how cute she was or how white her skin was, which she gets everywhere, so that's nothing new. The only memorable part was when one student, who I will call Saki (for that is her name--咲, meaning "blossom"), followed up "You are cute" with "外国人になりたい" ("I want to be a foreigner"). That was a bit odd, though it's certainly a good story to tell the other teachers at Suzugamine. Having pale skin is huge in Japan--a lot of Japanese people tan really easily. You can tell especially with any of the students on the tennis or baseball teams. They tend to have very dark skin anywhere not under their uniform and pretty pale skin otherwise. Do not point this out to them.

Some of the teachers at Suzugamine kind of make me feel unwelcome, but just today I was talking with Yoshimi-sensei, one of the teachers I tutor in English, and she told me that they don't say hello to her either. In fact, she knew instantly who I was talking about without having to describe them, and said it was mostly the same teachers she didn't like when she was a student there, and now she says they haven't changed. The whole thing came about when she and the librarian (we meet in the library) asked me if I felt like I knew what was going on, and I said that sometimes I didn't but I didn't blame too many people. After all, there's a morning meeting every day where they explain what's going in, right? It's not their fault I don't speak super-formal Japanese enough to really understand it all. But she related an incident where she put up a poster and then got yelled at about how that was forbidden, and that other teachers too often don't tell you to do something and then get annoyed when you don't do it. Then we bitched a bit about teachers who wouldn't update their styles ("I've taught this way for 30 years! It worked then, it works now!"), and I taught them "The more things change, the more they stay the same," though not in the original French.

Last weekend was the first time since Tōkyō that I've been to karaoke. It was actually a lot more fun that it was then (because of the smaller number of people), and much more fun than in America. Unlike the "sing in front of the whole bar" way it's done in America, Japanese karaoke parlours have dozens of small private rooms that you rent out. You can order food and drink using the in-room phone that's sent up. They also have songs I actually want to sing, like Within Temptation's What Have You Done, Nightwish's Amaranth, and the ever popular Never Gonna Give You Up. Sadly, I did not manage to press the "pre-empt order" button for the last song. Anyway, I've learned that I need to go to karaoke more often because it's a ton of fun.

I've been spending time hacking the Cthulhutech system, specifically the psychic bits. I wrote a lot of extra powers (detailed here) and also deleted some of the extraneous rolls and the tendency for powers to cost an enormous amount. It's a good system at base, but it requires some changes to really work well. Then again, for the game I'm running, I have so little interaction with the system that I could probably run it using conflict-based resolution in Risus and not suffer a significant amount (Kily: Psychic 2, Therapist 5, Judo 2).

I may be becoming an actual RPG freelancer due to the aforementioned system hacks as well. More info maybe, depending on A) whether it happens at all or B) the terms of the inevitable non-disclosure agreement.

As promised, here are some of the rules that Suzugamine students sign up for when they attend:

• Obviously, they have to wear uniforms. It's all mandated--skirts, shirts, shoes (two kinds) and even official socks with the school seal of them. Winter and summer versions of the uniform. And yes, some of them do hike their skirt up to Revolutionary Girl Utena levels even though it's an all-girls school. There's also an official schoolbag, and an official sportsbag if you're on a team. The main place for individuality is in the choice of pencilcase, folders, and the charms/stuffed animals they hang off their bags.


• Wearing the uniform outside of school is encouraged (this is actually a rule). This is because in Japan, a school uniform is considered formal clothing, and you can wear one where you'd wear a suit/nice dress in America (assuming you're high-school age, anyway).


• Hair cannot be colored, dyed, permed, styled, curled, braided, be-ribboned, or above the top of the head. Any student who naturally has brown or curly hair is required to file a "curly hair report" with the school office, otherwise "there may be difficulties." I am not making this up. The only permitted hairstyles are loose, ponytail, or pigtails. Pigtails are pretty common among high-school students, though when they hit college or their twenties they all switch to dying their hair blond. Kind of like America, actually, though Japanese hair means it turns out more a honey-brown color.

鶴姫伝説 was your standard Japanese love story. Boy, girl, boy meets girl, girl receives a vision from a goddess tellling her to take up the sword to defend her village, boy and girl fall in love, boy is killed delivering a message to a rival daimyo, girl hears from best friend who is now daimyo's servant that he gets blind drunk all the time, girl dresses in boy's armor and leads an army to defeat rival daimyo, girl ascends bodily into heaven leaving her armor behind. You know, typical. More seriously, I thought it was pretty neat, though I'm sure there were subtleties of the story that I didn't really understand. It was also a musical, which caught me by surprise.

The band in my current music is pretty neat. It's Finnish folk metal--you can get a good example of one of their songs is Ryyppäjäiset. It's instrumental, but you can get a nice summary of their musical style. Makes me want to play Unreal World again.

Tomorrow is the Suzugamine Sports Festival. That should be fun.

I'm never sure what my students are going to understand. Today, for example.

Me: "Okay, we'll finish a little early."
Them: *blank stare*
Me: (I know they know finish...) "You know finish? End?"
Them: *blank stare*
Me: "Stop?"
Them: *blank stare*
Me: "ちょっと早く終わります。"
Them: Oooooooh.
Me: *facepalm*

The reason I'm facepalming is they know what finish means--I ask them if they're done with a worksheet or a dialogue in English and they can answer just fine. Maybe "early" shut their brains down.

( RP-related nerdery )

I haven't been updating a lot lately, mainly because working full time and commuting two hours each way to get to my job takes a lot out of me. I've had a short vacation now, though, so I'm going to update with whats been going on. Let's see...

Well, first of all, the reason I had a vacation is because one of the students at Suzugamine came down with swine flu. A neighboring school had a group of students go to Hawai'i, and when they came back, they played a baseball game against Suzugamine. A few days later, both our student and theirs came down with swine flu. Our student lived in the dorms, so they postponed tests and shut the whole school down for a few days. The other teachers had to come in, but I didn't. Partially because I get treated a bit like a part-time teacher by the school--when I have nothing to do, I don't actually have to be there.

Chiyoda High School's cultural festival was a couple weeks ago. People here seem pretty surprised when I tell them that there isn't really anything like a cultural festival in America. I mean, elementary schools have fun fairs, but those aren't really the same thing. Anyway, it was pretty neat. The class homerooms rooms were all decorated in different themes (Egypt, space, a haunted house, etc.), and all the various clubs had displays. The manga club had a bunch of drawings, the tea ceremony club did tea ceremonies, the kagura club performed, and so on. It was a lot of fun, though I imagine it would get boring after a while since they're the same every year.

My phone stopped working a few days ago. As near as I can tell, Softbank stopped billing my credit card for it last month without informing me (or, at least, without informing me in English). I have no idea why. I can still get calls or texts in, but nothing goes out and I have no internet connection. We're going to try to get it fixed later today, in the same trip where we go to add my name to schoolpsychnerd's bank account like I should have asked them to do 11 months ago .

School is still going well. Slow sometimes, but good. The students are getting more used to me, though it can be difficult to communicate sometimes. Some of them want to learn but are bad at languages, some of them want to learn and are pretty good at it, most of them are just taking English because the government says they have to. The usual story. Lesson planning is kind of fun, but can be tedious. It's especially annoying with my Wednesday classes, because Wednesdays kept being used for different activities, so the Wednesday classes were about a month behind. Blarg.

That's all for now.