クリスマスin東京！ (Christmas in Tokyo!)

 First of all I would like to wish all you lovely readers a very Merry Christmas! I am also very sorry for the recent lack of postings. (I know you all must be going simply crazy not knowing what I am up to on this side of the world... ha!) My parents and both of my brothers have been in Tokyo for about a week and a half now and it's been a little hectic! This is my parents first time back to Japan since we moved away.. way back when.. in about 1993, so basically they have been trying to fit about 18 years worth of reunions into their little two week trip. I think this Christmas is also the first time that the 5 of us have all been together in quite some time.. I'd be more specific but I'm actually not sure of when the last time all of us were together. Anyways, it's been very busy (no time for jet lag!) but it's been a lot of fun!

Our dorm has become like a little family! We organized a 'Secret Santa' swap and made sure that everyone was covered and able to enjoy a nice Christmas away from home. Since my real family was here on Christmas I only spent a brief morning with all the 留学生（international students) on Christmas Day, it was a lot of fun though. Everyone came downstairs to open presents in our little basement kitchen, which was as decorated as we could get it. We even thumb-tacked socks to the wall as stockings!

I think it was some time in November that my mom sent me this little charlie brown Christmas tree. It had no decorations on it at first, but luckily my friend Dan got sent some ornaments, chocolates, and tinsel which we used to make the tree a bit more festive.

Our Christmas tree topper this year was an angelic Justin Bieber.. we cut him out from a People magazine that was also conveniently sent by my mom. 

At about noon on Christmas Day, I met up with my family and we all went to Shinbashi to a 焼肉(yakiniku -  grilled meat) restaurant with my whole extended family! In the above picture is from left: Brendan, Pampers, Big T, me, Aya, and Alex. For those of you who don't know, Aya is Alex's fiance! 

The whole gang! Not entirely where to start for naming everyone so I think I'll skip it, basically the man in the middle, Tatsuru, and the man giving the thumbs up on the top left, Yutaka, are my mom's two cousins. Everyone else is either a wife/husband or a child or a grandchild! It was really nice to be able to see them all again. There were a lot of 'remember when' and 'you used to be this big' talks and stories that day.

And now for a brief history of Christmas in Japan!

First off, it's not a national holiday (it was on a Sunday this year but usually it's just like any old regular day...). It's also super commercialized. Starting from mid-November (maybe even earlier) it seemed that every single store you went into played some variation of Christmas music. Or at least what they thought was Christmas Music, occasionally you would hear songs you recognize. Some examples, We Wish you a Merry Christmas and Last Christmas by George Michael.

Christmas in Japan is more like New Years Eve or maybe even Valentines Day. It's not the jolly, spend the day lounging by the warm fire in matching pajamas while it snows outside, read books, rent movies,and drink eggnog with your family kind of day that we're used to. Actually I don't know what I just described, I can't even begin to picture my family in matching pajamas, but you get the idea. Christmas Eve is a big night for couples in Japan, they typically go out to eat (yes, Japanese people do actually eat Kentucky Fried Chicken on Christmas! Kind of a weird tradition, but they had good intentions. Ovens in Japan are a rarity, and so are birds other than chicken, so instead of a big turkey the next best thing is chicken!) and couples also go look at イルミネーション（illuminations!) Christmas lights.

This was in 六本木（Roppongi), which is a nice area of Tokyo. The place that my parent's are staying is nearby so it was about a 10 minute walk to see all these pretty lights. I went here with a few friends and Brendan since he arrived a few days before my parents but on Christmas Eve (the day my parents got here) we couldn't really get through the massive crowds of couples to get close enough to see the lights. You can kind of tell how crowded this area got from the picture above, it was massively crowded, especially on Christmas Eve night.

Total Lunar Eclipse

A few weeks ago there was a lunar eclipse - it was beautiful! unfortunately I don't have any pictures of it but I do have pictures of us watching it. We could see it very well from our little smoking area/recycle bin area, but a bunch of us decided to wander over to the parking lot next to our dorm and lie down with blankets to watch it. It was a lot of fun! Very pretty.

澄江 Sumi-e Final Project

 One of the classes that I am taking this semester is Modern Sumi-e. Sumi is the type of ink, it's the same type of ink used in traditional calligraphy and it is made from charcoal. You can buy 'instant' ink at just about any convenience store now but for our class we have to make our own ink every time. It takes about 5 or 10 minutes to make the proper dark black and then you use that to make softer tones of black. Overall there are three tones of black -dark, middle, and light. The art is black and white traditionally but modern sumi-e occasionally uses a bit of color.

This is my final project - it's an elephant (the eye and part of the nose and tusk) we did this project on washi paper (special Japanese paper made from rice) and it was difficult because the ink tends to bleed A LOT. but it turned out alright so I'm okay with it! We pasted it onto a wooden block/frame and over the next month they will be hung up somewhere in the school. 

Pub Quiz!

My friend Emelie and I decided to host a pub quiz/trivia night event in the dorm, so for about 2 weeks we prepared a bunch of 'world friendly' questions and then we also went through the process of translating those questions into Japanese. We had about 25 or so questions and another few picture based questions. Some of the questions we used were incredibly hard for Japanese people (Write the kanji for the word depression - look it up! It's one of the hardest to write.) and some of the questions were incredibly difficult for English speakers (what is natadecoco made from?) but overall the night was a success!

The 'quiz masters'
Yuko is the Japanese quiz master (she read the Japanese questions aloud) and Emelie and I were the English question readers.

Here's an example of some of our picture questions- name the country's flag, name the company's logo, name the country.

More picture questions! Name the car logo, characters, and movie scenes.

There were about 5 groups of 4 people and everyone paid 100yen to participate in our pub quiz! The winners received the money and second and third place winners just got a bunch of candy. It was a lot of fun though and we will most likely be doing another game night event soon!

Things in Japan

My brother is coming for a visit soon! Super exciting. He keeps asking what things are popular in Japan right now... Not entirely sure how to answer that one but I decided to do a post dedicated to random things in Japan. And by that I mean I'm mostly just going to put videos up of my favorite commercials.

This is a Pocky Commercial, featuring a guy from the boyband Arashi. The way boybands work in Japan is pretty intense because once these guys get popular they are literally everywhere. (TV, movies, singing, commercials, advertisements, you name it.) It's constantly being shown on one of the big screens in Shibuya Crossing, very catchy though. The bit at the end that sounds like 'Tabe-time' is actually 'Tabe-tai'. It's a clever play on words! (Tabe-tai means I want to eat.)

This song is always sung at Karaoke (well, at least the two times that I've been.) AKB48 is huge in Japan! They are a girl group, the AKB stands for Akihabara (place in Tokyo) where the group was formed. There are technically 48 members in the group but they get divided into subgroups, and I think fans can vote for the 20 or so girls they want to participate in the next song. I'm actually not really sure how it works, but anywhere you go in Tokyo you will at least hear one of their songs. Apparently there are other groups formed in the same fashion - SKE48 (Sakae area of Nagoya), SDN48 (Saturday Night, they're intended for a more mature audience), and NMB48 (Namba, Osaka).

This is a commercial for instant noodles! Quite possibly my favorite one.

This is another song you hear often in Japan. It's a group called Girls Generation. The best part of this video though is the parody video done by a bunch of old Japanese men. 

スポーツ大会！ Sports Event!

Some of the buddies organized a special sports event where we all got together and played sports. The sports we chose to play were volleyball, and then we switched to basketball. When you think about it, volleyball isn't exactly a 'pick up' type of game, a lot of planning needs to go into that one.. but it was fun anyways since only a handful of people actually knew the rules of volleyball. After everyone sufficiently bruised their arms and wrists, we switched to playing basketball.


Those of us who were terrible at basketball decided to do cartwheels and gymnastics and leapfrog races.

After awhile we also started spinning around as fast as we could and then tried to walk on a straight line. We all ended up falling over, it was a lot of fun!

We also played airplane..

Here's a shot of us actually participating in some sports.. sort of. 

more spinning!

It was a lot of fun, the gym at our school is very big, two basketball courts. There are Kendo rooms near the gym where the kids who do Kendo were starting to warm up... I don't know to much about Kendo but the warm involves a lot of crazy loud shouting. It was very intimidating to hear them!

映画館！ movie theatre!

ハードロマンチッカー　（Hard Romantic-er) 

Went to see a movie today because I didn't have any classes, and also Wednesday is ladies day at the movie theatres! Normal student prices are about 1,500yen but on Wednesdays ladies get in for 1,000yen. Not too bad for a movie. The choices we had were an American film called ピザボーイ( Pizza Boy, but in English it's 30 Minutes or Less), a Japanese film, another Japanese film, and a bunch of other Japanese films. We decided to go for the film about the yakuza.. which turned out pretty much exactly how you expect a gangster film to be. You can kind of get an idea from the trailer... lots of violence. I think the thing that surprised us most is that a lot of it would have been edited out if it was shown in America. There was a lot of rape and a lot of women being beaten, but apart from all that though it was a good movie! It had a sad ending. We went with our Japanese friend who had to help explain some parts of it but for the most part I was able to understand the majority of the movie! Next time we decided a comedy might be better though.