Keihan-chan

Keihan-chan (Keiko Morishoji) showcasing the goods of Higashiyama

In a PiTaPa ad

In 2000, the Keihan train line launched an advertising campaign called おかいはん (okeihan) to promote themselves using young, fashionable spokeswomen photographed around the Osaka-Kyoto area, seeing the sights and culture available in towns and cities along the train line. This campaign was still running when I lived in Osaka, and the current Okeihan girl was Keiko Morishoji (the idea being that she lived near Morishoji Station!), the third-generation Okeihan character, who started in 2006. Keiko (played by actress Jinno Sachi) was born into a musical family and was a Conservatory of Music student at the "Duck River Academy of Music." She was the face of the campaign until 2009, and I thought she was the cutest thing on this earth. Her clothes were bright, stylish and just the sort of things I liked to wear, and she was always doing something that looked interesting to me. I started to take photos of her ads when I saw them, and downloaded a bunch of Okeihan desktop wallpapers.

Emily often teased me about my enthusiasm for Keiko, whom I called "Keihan-chan," not knowing her name at the time. We travelled on that line pretty much daily, and often together, so whenever a new poster came out (and that was fairly frequently!) I was all over it. I professed my love for Keihan-chan every time I guided someone new through the Keihan train system. And then...then, they retired my Keihan-chan and replaced her with a new girl, Keiko Kuzuha!

Kuzuha was cute enough, but I never expected Keihan-chan to vanish so suddenly, so I was quite disappointed. At the time, I didn't realize that there were two other Okeihan spokesgirls prior to my arrival in Japan - Keiko Yodoya and Keiko Kyobashi. Well. 

As it turns out, the Keihan line is launching their newest girl to stardom very shortly - voting starts this Monday, October 15th, for the brand-new Okeihan campaign.

Yodoya, Kyobashi, Morishoji (♥) and Kuzuha

Well! I guess it's my civic duty, then, if we MUST have a new Keihan-chan, to make sure the proper one gets picked! Be sure to pop by Keihan's website tomorrow and cast a vote!

The Humid Japanese Summer

The Pepsi NEX summer life

Here in Toronto, our heat wave has finally broken, or so my roommate tells me - my response was "what heat wave?" The weather in Toronto, hanging around 30 degrees Celsius (86°F) has never really bothered me, compared to Osaka, which boasts some of the most humid days and nights in the country.

I often really miss summer in Japan. It's true, it was muggy, sticky and came part and parcel with all the bad stuff - I remember when all the maple candy omiyage I had brought from Canada fused into a giant mass, and ruining my first rice cooker by forgetting to clean it out before I left town during the hottest part of the summer. One year, I had kept some chocolate matcha Meltykisses from winter that, well, melted. As much fun as it was to go to festivals, I found yukata really stifling on the hottest summer nights, and distinctly remember undressing in a stall in JR Kyoto Station during Gion Matsuri just to get some of the heat off, before re-tying everything and slogging back out there. It wasn't great, but I detest the cold, so I quickly warmed up (ha ha) to the hot and humid summers and even began to enjoy them.

After Osaka, summers in Canada have been easy as pie. While my friends (raised on the east coast where both summers and winters are mild) suffer through humidity that's completely undetectable to me, I relish actually getting to wear short sleeves. 

In Japan I spent a lot of my summer days in the staff room at school, conserving my precious nenkyu (paid vacation days) for the visits of the many friends who stayed with me. I often worked through obon as the only person in the school! Thinking back to that, someone must have unlocked the gate every day, but it was rare to encounter even a single person through the whole 8 hours. I would let myself into the office and take the keys to the staff room, then sit at my desk near the window and write or read. No students, no teachers. It was somewhat eerie, but at the same time, very peaceful. 

The staff room had no air conditioner, but the fan was right behind my desk to provide some relief. Sometimes I'd go down to the womens' lounge and sit there awhile on the warm tatami. Tried not to do that too much, as it was very easy to fall asleep! I just became quite comfortable with the temperature in the school in summer - it reminded me of many summers spent at camp in New Brunswick. When I wasn't at school during summer, I travelled - to Tokyo, mostly, and once to Los Angeles. I traded the humid heat for dry heat, and didn't really care for the switch. Returning to Tokyo was a relief!

Of course, my love of the heat made winters all the worse - doubly worse after returning to Canada! Can't say I'm much looking forward to the temperatures starting to drop over the next few months...

Photo of the Day - The View

I absolutely love this photo of the school courtyard, taken from a second-floor hallway window.
It always makes me nostalgic for my school and my students!

Irish Chocolate

Not sure if Irish.

When I'd been in Japan about a year or so, my friend Marisa told me that one of her friends from university was going to be doing a study-abroad in Japan. Imagine our surprise when she turned out to be living right in my city! I offered to guide this friend, Meghan, to Kobe to meet up with some friends of her parents, as I was planning to visit Kobe for Pink Ribbon Day. Kobe Port Tower was going to be lit in pink, and it was something I wanted to see.

I met Meghan and her friends from 〇〇 University just before the light-up, and after seeing the Tower and greeting her guests, we went out to Bikkuri Donkii for dinner. I was intrigued by the 'Irish Chocolate' drink on the menu. Did it have Baileys in it, I wondered? Kahlua? Was it some special kind of chocolate that was better than, say, Belgian or British? I decided to ask our server before I ordered it.

When she arrived, I managed (in my not-great Japanese), to inquire "What is the Irish Chocolate?"

The server explained that it was a chocolate drink made with cream.

"OK. So what is in it?"

"Milk, and cocoa..."

"Wait, but why is it 'Irish' chocolate, then?"

She didn't understand my question at all. "Eh?"

"Why is it called Irish?"

She just looked at me, confused, so I thought maybe it was my poor Japanese (which it was, but this didn't help). I asked "What is 'Irish' about it? Does it have Irish alcohol? Irish flavour?"

"I don't understand."

Frustrated, I ran out of ways to creatively word my question. "Does it taste like Ireland? What does it have in it that's Irish??"

A helpless shrug. The waitress didn't seem upset, just confused - my table, however, was almost in tears laughing.

Feeling quite incompetent in front of my new friends, who were all exchange students and sure to be totally fluent in three months while I continued to struggle with reading my phone bill, I decided to get the drink and figure it out myself. It was slightly coffee-flavoured, a blender drink not unlike you might get at Starbucks.  Right, coffee - you know, like Irish Coffee, except not quite. Only later did I realize where we had gotten our wires crossed - that to me, Irish means 'something from Ireland,' whereas to her 'Irish' was just a curious English word whose meaning was a mystery. In Japanese, to say something has the properties of a place, you would say the name of the country itself - in this case, airurando (Ireland) kara or airurando no mono. Had I used the Japanese word for "Irish" instead of what was printed on the menu, I would certainly have had better luck.

ああ。そうだったのか。

At least the drink was delicious. As for my new friends, Nicole and I are still in contact, and Meghan and I now get together on Skype every week to study for the JLPT, so if I must be incompetent, at least I'm in good company!

Melon Pan

There used to be a truck that came by each Friday and parked by our local train station, offering dozens of varieties of my favourite baked treat - melon pan. This combination of cookie + bread was created in the image of a rock melon, and ever so occasionally even have a melon taste! Melon pan are pretty old hat, but the Beikudo truck - which makes its rounds along various cities in northeast Osaka - was really something special. They would have the bread warming in the ovens in there, for one thing, and the selection was amazing.

My friend S and I routinely picked up half a dozen or more from Beikudo to bring home for the weekend - it was our "TGIF" ritual.

I would die for one of these right now

I had never seen anything quite like Beikudo. The bakery nearest my home station stocked a fairly boring lineup of plain melon pan, and a chocolate-chip variety. Occasionally they'd have a "theme" month where you might be lucky enough to get something like cocoa, but mostly, it was just the regular fare. Beikudo, however, had some flavours that were incredibly off the beaten path. I could be here all day listing them - sadly, they don't feature a full list on their website. Here are a few I can remember, including a couple of favourites: 

Plain
Black tea
Green tea
Caramel
Chocolate
Chocolate cookie
Chocolate cream cookie
Chocolate orange
Melon cream
Strawberry
Coconut
Pumpkin
Apple & Spinach

If it was seasonal, there would be a melon pan flavour for it. How I miss Beikudo!

Three "specialty" flavours: Spinach & Apple, Pumpkin, and Coconut

Now that I'm home, melon pan is very tough to find in Toronto. I've never seen any variety except plain, and they also dry out so fast that if you arrive at J-Town's Nakamura Bakery by day's end (if there are even any left), they aren't half as good. Melon pan are meant to be soft, and while I sometimes kept my Beikudo purchases to last through the weekend - and even mailed a boxful packed in Tupperware to a friend in Canada! - I find Nakamura's have reached their life by the next morning. Very unfortunate.

If you're interested in trying to make your own (and I fear this might be me tonight), you can find a recipe over here at Japan Chan!

Lessons At 〇〇 High School

My desk in the early days - lookin' tidy!

I can say without hesitation that I was one of the luckiest JETs in Osaka to have landed at the school I did. Time after time I heard horror stories of ALTs who taught one class a week and were prevented from reading, studying or doing anything non-work-related, or ALTs who were disliked and humiliated by their partner teachers, or weren't able to use any of their contractual sick days. There is a well-known saying on the JET Programme; "Every Situation is Different." Nobody but your predecessor can give you a real idea what you're walking into - and you only hear from them a month or two before you're boarding the plane.

Imagine my relief when I ended up in not only an OK school, but a great school. The kids and teachers at OO High School were a wonderful crowd - I was privileged enough to teach an advanced stream of students who actually wanted to learn English and about foreign affairs. I partnered with one wonderful teacher for my first 7 months or so, then replaced a departing NET (Native English Teacher), inheriting his schedule instead, where I essentially had carte blanche with the class. It made me nervous, but my kids worked so hard and they were a joy to teach. There were about 15 students in each class, and I usually taught between 2 and 5 per day for the rest of my time at the school, as well as a (changing all the time) English reading class and a social studies class, with partner teachers.

Gym class in progress

In Japan, the students usually stay in their own classrooms, and it is the teachers who move around. I was lucky enough, though, to have been assigned one of the general-purpose rooms for my lessons, rather than going to their classroom. Since the class was actually divided into groups, and I was only teaching one of the groups, we had to split up into three rooms. When I took over the previous NET's teaching position, I got the classroom that came with it, and since there were no other lessons scheduled in that room in my first year, I had the opportunity to decorate it for Christmas and Halloween, and put up past projects on the walls. I was very fortunate to have had this space all to myself as it served as both a retreat for me, and also as a very personalized room for my conversation and creativity-focused lessons.

I wasn't really ready to launch into the place our NET left off, I think, but after we settled into things we managed to build a good rapport. My lessons were very relaxed, with high standards for presentations and an emphasis on creativity and conversation, but a more forgiving approach to grammar, as they were taking three other English classes in addition to mine. My ultimate goal was for students to learn confidence when speaking English and how to talk about things that interested them, to keep them from feeling they couldn't have real conversations. I worried, many times, that my forgetfulness and tendency to be disorganized (turned out to be ADHD, who knew?) would land me in trouble - I had to make up lengthy rubrics for every project to make sure that I graded the first group I saw the same way I graded the final group, since with the changing schedules the presentations were often weeks or a month apart. Sometimes a lesson plan went so awry with Group A that I came up with an entirely new one the next day for Group B. It required a lot of flexibility, which I'm not always good at, but we had a lot of fun. 

I used to joke with my students that I was amasugiru - too soft on them, and maybe I was, but when my first group of graduates handed in their final project of the year (an essay on 'My School Life'), I was so proud of how far they'd come. Things were tough sometimes, especially when it came to teaching social studies, but I would not have traded my school and the staff and students there for any other school in Japan.

Emily

She made my entire year with this Kuririn cake

I couldn't give you a proper introduction to my life in Japan without talking about Emily, my lifesaver. She lived a floor below me in an apartment identical to mine. She arrived in Japan with the Group A JETs, about a week before I did, and introduced herself to me the day I arrived - our predecessors had been good friends. The girl who used to teach at 〇〇 High School had previously occupied my apartment, while the girl who taught at 〇〇 N High School had occupied hers. Convenient!

Emily is American, from Pennsylvania, and she has an amazing range of hobbies, from cooking to sewing to crafting jewellery. I didn't realize, when we met, that we had so much in common; I was just happy there was another JET in my apartment complex. We didn't really hang out much until she invited me to go to the Tokyo Game Show that September (I definitely had an allergy to fun at times), but from then on, we were inseparable. Between carrying 30 pounds of food home in a duffel bag to make Christmas dinner, a week-long hot spring vacation in Kyushu, seeing Phoenix Wright: The Musical performed by Takarazuka, attending a party in formal wear in a torrential rainstorm- most of my best memories in Japan involved Em. She was very good at having a good time and excellent at prying me out of my apartment when I didn't really feel up to facing the world. I could not have asked for a better friend.

Emily is still in Osaka - she's finishing her final contract year in Japan and coming back to the States this summer. We are....really bad at keeping regular contact. Between being busy and the time difference, it can be tough, and it's still crazy sometimes to think that she's been there all that time while I've been here. (What was I thinking!?) But Pennsylvania and Toronto are not so far apart, so I'm hoping to see her again soon. You're the best, Emily! I miss you! ♥

Zen Living

Space is a premium in Japan. Most Japanese are pretty taken aback by the size of ranch-style homes in North America, and it's quite common for any single - not just students - to rent a 1DK or an LDK until they are ready to start a family.

Apartments are measured by the number of rooms and the number of tatami, traditional straw mats, that fit in each room. I lived in a 1K apartment, with the 1 meaning 1 room, and the K standing for kitchen. A 1DK would add a dining area; an L (LDK, 2LDK, etc) brings a living room into the picture. While I didn't have tatami in my apartment (a crushing disappointment - it was one of the uniquely Japanese things I was really looking forward to!), my space measured about rokujo, or 6 mats' worth. (According to Wikipedia, 6 mats = 2.73 m × 3.64 m ≈ 9 ft × 12 ft.) I had a kitchen that was a hair larger than a kitchenette, as well as a toilet room and a bath room, separated, each with its own little door.

My charming living room

My charming kitchen

At first glance I was Not Impressed. My predecessor had warned me that the apartment was on the small side, commenting that she had "enjoyed learning how to maximize [her] use of space." Still, in her photos (which I sadly no longer have - curse you Kodak Gallery Online!) it looked spacious enough! She used the oshiire, the closet for storing futon, as an in-wall desk and had hung poles inside for her clothes. She could just close off that space by shutting the door. And honestly, looking at the circa-2007 photos above, it does look spacious. The problem is that I'm a packrat, and a packrat who wanted tons of adorable Japanese furniture and accessories.

A pretty typical Japanese living room.

Didn't last.

I was prepared to roll with the whole thing, with a few conditions.

The first thing I wanted was a kotatsu. Step off plane; buy kotatsu was my plan. That didn't work out - I arrived in August, after all. (I'll save the kotatsu for another, more seasonally-appropriate post.) Instead, I bought a Super Famicom, the Japanese original version of the Super Nintendo. I imagined myself amused for hours in my zenlike little apartment with a SuFami and the twelve books I had carefully packed to make sure each suitcase was 70 lbs, no more, no less. In my apartment with no chairs and no bed, I was living the minimalist lifestyle. I congratulated myself on leaving most of my worldly possessions behind - one suitcase was clothes, one was omiyage and my computer monitor and keyboard, and my books. Fantastic. Beautiful. Who needed chairs, anyway!?

...I needed chairs. Sort of. Well, we had this wonderful department store nearby, Vivre, and they had these really cute legless chairs for sitting at kotatsu and other low tables. Then I found a legless lounging chair I thought would be perfect for those long SuFami afternoons. I biked to a department store 90 minutes away to buy this item, and blew a tire on my way home with a bunch of stuff strapped to my bike.

Soon I had deemed the couch (it was a Western-style futon that folded into an uncomfortable bed) inherited from my pred a waste of space, and pushed it upright against the wall where it would stay out of my way. We nicknamed this the "death trap" after it fell on me one night as I slept. Sofas = wood frames. I bought a super-length laundry pole, floor to ceiling, to prop it up where it couldn't fall and kill anyone. Great conversation starter, and in a pinch, I even took it down and slept on it.

I bought two Japanese-style futons to save space, got my kotatsu in autumn, and inherited four portable tatami squares from a JET who left the following August, working my way up to the "traditional" room I'd wanted when I first planned to go to Japan. I kept a dresser in the oshiire as well as the poles my predecessor had left. At one point I kept the TV in there until it was clear I was running out of space. I had two sets of plastic drawers in there, as well as my spare futon, the box from my kotatsu (so I could ship it back to Canada one day), and tons of misc clothes and small electronics and cardboardy things. Soon I was storing things on the balcony like a native, though I still didn't think I was doing too badly. After all, I hadn't succumbed and gotten a bed, or a clothes dryer, or a dishwasher or even a chair with legs. I congratulated myself on not buying an adorable legless red loveseat I'd seen at a furniture store in Neyagawa. Even so, my possessions began to stack on top of themselves, and I had run out of storage space. I wasn't psychologically capable of zen living - I hardly even played my SuFami.

My book collection doubled, then tripled, then quadrupled, then I stopped counting. Curse you, 100-yen bookstores!

I acquired a fan and a vacuum cleaner and two folding tables, and in the kitchen a microwave and a bigger fridge and an electric kettle, and I hardly need to tell you that it went all downhill from there...

When I left Japan, I had 12 full 30-kilo (66-pound) boxes to mail to Canada, even after throwing away everything I could bear to part with. For most things, the cost of replacing them here would have been the same or more than the cost of shipping it. But even now I'll suddenly stop and think "Whatever happened to my ____________? Why didn't I take that home? I wish I had taken that home."

Osaka, My Town

The view from my apartment building

I spent the tenure of my JET years in Osaka prefecture in a small city northeast of the prefectural capital. Since this blog is going to be quite personal, out of respect for everyone's privacy, I'm not going to make it easy to discover the name of my town or my school - I taught at, let's say OO High School, a high-level school with a specialized English stream to help students get into a good university.

My city was a beautiful little spot, and although I complained from time to time about how far it was from things I wanted to do in Osaka city itself (frequent trips to Minoo, one of the nicer hot springs in Osaka, were out of the question), it really was a wonderful place. I lived less than 5 minutes from a train station, a grocery store, 4 convenience stores, a park, my bank and a fantastic takoyaki shop. School was 12 minutes' bike ride away.

OO City had a population not too far off from my own hometown, so the size was comfortable for me, and living close to the station was great. Both Osaka and Kyoto were easily reachable. We had a grocery store in town that sold passable import food, and while my apartment was smaller than I initially imagined, it was clean and bright. I also had a JET neighbour who moved in a week before I did and almost instantly became the best friend I could ever have asked for in Japan. In fact, she's still there, but I'm looking forward to welcoming her back to the West this summer.

I struggled with homesickness and heartbreak during my time abroad and it was this difficult period that made me realize that I was not, in fact, destined to spend my life there. There are so many ways things could have gone differently; if I had studied more, or if I had visited home more, perhaps I would still be there now too. I quickly found that my homesickness for Japan was worse than my homesickness for Canada - that of course was how this blog came about. Most "lifers" would probably laugh at my short experience, too - many of the NETs working for the Osaka Board of Education had been there a decade or more. I think my biggest problem was that I wanted so badly to stay - but the combination of things on my mind was so much that I knew I had to leave, for my own health.

Still, I'll always consider Osaka my second home - were it not for those few crucial factors here, I would go back in a heartbeat.

Welcome

Hello everyone, and welcome to my new blog - Tadaimatte. As a bit of background, I returned from living abroad in Japan a little more than a year ago, and have found the adjustment back to life in Canada a little difficult. I think everyone thought me to be a "lifer" once I got over there, but there are important people here whom I hated being so far away from!

I've been looking for ways to connect with my life in Japan and put some of the reverse culture shock and homesickness to rest. I volunteer with exchange students and write for JapanTourist, and from time to time I write as well. I thought, why not share some of these struggles, and document some of my memories from Japan? Thus the creation of this blog. I hope everyone - ex-expats and Japan hopefuls alike - will find something close to home in my writings.

ただいま。。。って。