As the end of my Japan visit kept nearing, I continually pushed back my departure date. I originally meant to stay two months. I extended that to 10 weeks near the end of December and then 12 weeks as I closed in on the 15th of January. The Israel/Gaza situation was getting a lot of press and even more pressure so I ultimately decided that there would be better times to visit Egypt. I was down to Korea, France, and New York for the rest of my trip.

 

My last month in Japan had stopped being tourism and became more about spending time with the special people I’d met there, specifically Lorna. Halfway through January, I learned that Silvia’s living situation in Korea had become unstable. I decided that since staying in Japan was so appealing already, I would opt to not further complicate her life with my visit. Then, with the US Economy still nosediving, I began to worry about money. I decided that a $1500 ticket to France for a week of spending Euros and another $1200 ticket to New York wasn’t the best idea. My globe trotting trip had stopped at Japan. I pushed my departure date back to the 4th of February. Of course some of these cuts were simply to accommodate my desire to stay in Japan.

 

There were some notable highlights to my last month in Japan. On the 8th of February, Lorna’s mother Kris and I headed to Osaka’s World’s Fair Park and it’s Museum of Ethnology. The museum contained works of art from countries of the world (excluding North America) and information on how they coordinated to the cultures that created them. I particularly enjoyed demon masks from Southeast Asia and the examples of many of the written languages of the world. There was a machine in Japan’s section which gave an example of all the local dialects of Japanese. Even with my rudimentary Japanese I heard how different the language could be throughout even this small country. The World’s Fair has created a lot of interesting attractions around the world. Most famous is the Eiffel Tower, which is one of the main tourist destinations in Paris. In Osaka, they created the Tower of the Sun. Nowhere near as famous as Eiffel’s tower, but distinctly Japanese in its oddity, it is deceptively tall.

 

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To start off 2009, I headed back to Yodo from Lorna’s apartment. It was a cold and quiet morning in Japan. I could tell it was the new year because the ads on the train had changed. The first advertisement of 2009 was for a shopping center who had chosen to display their wares with a Japanese model wearing a cow hat.

 

 

I got back to the Hisa clan’s house in Yodo around 11 AM. The house was still except for Kenta, who was past his gate at the door. Everyone was still asleep from the previous night. Rickie was the first one to wake up, which told me I had definitely missed a strange night. As it turned out, everyone had gone to the temple before midnight and come home around 2 AM. Will and Rickie then went back into Kyoto for some parties. Rickie had gotten home at 7 AM. As the rest of the country began to wake up in it’s post-celebratory haze, I heard a few stories during everyone’s recovery. Hisa and Isamu were up sometime around noon, instantly snapping back into their normal roles.

 

I passed the day with little excitement. Unfortunately the next day was quite similar. Lorna and her mother set off for Tokyo on the 2nd, and Will arrived in Yodo to prepare for their trip to Hokkaido. 2009 was shaping up to be a very quiet year.

 

On the 3rd, I woke up alone in the house. Everyone had left for Hokkaido and it was just Kenta and I. My task for the day was to find something to do for my four days of solitude. I spent time on the internet and then headed to the Kaikan dorm to hang out with Bob, Kyle, and Daniel (Will’s neighbor). Kyle jailbroke my iphone and showed me a lot of the new applications I could download while we all watched movies and played Mario on the Wii virtual console. The evening ended a little before midnight with me taking the long walk back to Yodo.

 

The next morning I found myself in a similar position as the day before. It was cold, I was alone, and I needed something to do to keep me from having long conversations with Kenta. I headed back out to the Kaikan again, but this time with the plan of dinner and drink.

 

We all went to a small noodle restaurant near the dorm. Bob and I had a beer with dinner then we all grabbed a few more at a convenience store on the way back. There’s something about being in college that takes the edge off of drinking like a hobo. Or it could just be that drinking at a bar is prohibitively expensive in Japan. Around 11:50 PM I had a small buzz but wasn’t really interested in returning to Yodo. I convinced Bob to let me stay on his floor and made another trip to the quickie mart on the corner for some Kirin Strong 7.

 

 

After midnight, I ended up discussing American politics in the Middle East with Hasan. Hasan is a Moroccan student who’s been in Japan for several years. Between some slurring and the language barriers in both English and Japanese, I’m not sure he understood my point. We both settled that we didn’t think what Israel was doing was right. Hasan said he didn’t care that it was a Jewish-Muslim conflict, he just didn’t want to see anyone dying. I couldn’t agree more. An hour or two later, Kyle had disappeared and Bob and I realized we were the last ones awake. I slept on the blankets from Bob’s kotatsu (heated table) in unexpected comfort.

 

In the morning I got up and made the trip to Yodo. It was cold and I was not feeling great. Kirin Strong 7 is not really a beer. It’s a beer flavored 7% alcohol drink. This feature had given it a particularly disgusting hangover effect. Kenta was beside himself with loneliness when I got back, practically backflipping with joy to see me.

 

Recovering from my hangover, I spent the day on the internet and sitting at the kotatsu. Feeling the inertia to remain lazy, I did the same thing the next day. I watched Jurassic Park on youtube, cleaned up some photos I’d taken, and whiled away the hours. In the late evening, Hisa, Isamu, Rickie, and Will returned from their ski trip in Hokkaido. Hisa made sure to make fun of the instant ramen containers I’d thrown away. I don’t care, they were delicious and cheap.

 

After two and a half days of nothing, I finally had something to do on Wednesday. Lorna and her mother had returned late the night before. She had a half day in the morning and I was headed out to meet up with her for lunch. We ate and caught up on her trip while her mother was out seeing some of her Kyoto friends. Though I’d seen her when she got back to Japan, the weekend had felt very long. When her mother returned we went for dinner at Cafe Independents near Shijo. Lorna and I had tried to go there before, finding it closed for a private party. It was worth the return trip in both food and atmosphere. It was getting late and very cold so I decided to stay with Lorna and her mother, rather than risk the weather on the long walk in Yodo.

Catching up on the Journal, the main events from the end of 2008:

 

December 26th - The Crazy Crab Party

 

The day after Christmas was more lively than the day before by a long shot. Hisa and Isamu threw a party for their friends to consume massive amounts of Japanese crab. A total of 14 people came to consume crab and drink the night away. The first bit of crab I ate was not so bad, the second piece was pretty delicious, the third piece was not too great, and the fourth renewed my hatred for crab. Not speaking Japanese, I simply ate boiled pork and veggies for over an hour and a half. As the crab waned, I noticed that every single Japanese person in the room was vivaciously drunk.

 

December 27th - The Bread Lesson

 

The day after the Crazy Crab Party, Hisa’s neighbor arrived for a lesson in how to make bread. I was happy to teach her and happier still to make more bread. Unfortunately, she had bought Kraft Cheddar Cheese Food instead of real cheese. We spent over an hour breaking it into spongey pieces of yellow during the rising process. The lesson produced delicious bread, nonetheless. She learned to make bread, and I learned about measurements in Japanese and Metric. She wrote down what she learned and I did not.

 

December 28th & 29th - Cleaning

 

Amid two days of extreme boredom, I found myself doing housework to pass the time. In order to properly welcome the new year, Japanese households clean EVERYTHING. The first day I was employed to clean all the high places in the house that only I could reach. It was an easy job that I found entertaining, as my rag quickly became black in the places no one had been able to clean all year. The following day, there was yard work to be done. Trimming hedges and sweeping up. In the afternoon, Isamu and I drove to Yuki’s house to pick up a massive stone bowl. The bowl took three people to move even a short distance into the trunk of the car and I feared it would crush my foot rolling as we set it down.

 

December 30th - Mochi Day

 

One of the main reasons I had originally decided to stay in Japan for December was to make Mochi on this day. We made lots and lots of mochi for the family and friends in the neighborhood. It turned out to be a beautiful day as we sat watching. In the stone bowl we picked up, we took turns pounding saturated rice into a sticky dough. Afterwards it was rolled into balls and coated in flour. How can you not enjoy food that’s made by smashing things with a giant wooden hammer? After mochi, I met Lorna and her mother, who had returned the previous evening.

 

December 31st - Oshogatsu Eve

 

The big holiday here in December is New Year’s. In preparation for it, Buddhist monks will ring the temple bells 108 times before midnight. This represents cleansing the 108 sins of man. I was set to meet up with Lorna and her mother, Kris, for the temple-going. Unfortunately, during their flight layover in LA, they had gotten food poisoning and Lorna was bed-ridden. Kris and I planned to go to hear the bells for a short time without Lorna. After watching a movie in the early evening, though, Kris felt like going to sleep herself. Instead of going alone, I decided to spend the beginning of the New Year with Lorna. Definitely a better option than a crowded ceremony alone that I couldn’t understand.