September 14, 2002 - 11:53PM
Wes Ehrlichman

Geez, it's been a while since I've updated. I've been really busy, but if I really wanted to I could have updated. I think not having my digital camera has taken a lot of my inspiration away. This whole writing stuff is usually just an excuse for me to explain my pictures, but the pictures are usually not anywhere near as interesting as the writing (I think so anyways). On the bright side of this, today they called and told me that the camera is done and I can pick it up tomorrow any time until 8:30 PM. I guess tomorrow afternoon I'm heading to Sendai!

At any rate, even without a camera I'm making myself write this because I haven't written anything in a while. Today I went to see Star Wars: Episode 2 (for the 3rd time) with Yumi and Takahiro, her husband. I'm really starting to get better at communicating with them. Today I tried my hardest to speak in informal language with them as much as I could.

Status is very important to Japanese people and the language reflects that. There is an informal, a formal, and an ultra formal way of saying every sentence in Japanese. It usually involves making the sentence super short for the informal, and making the sentence take about three times as long as it should for the formal. In American schools almost all of the practice is done using the formal way, so that's how I speak to most people. They teach this first because it teaches you proper grammer and it's easy to learn the others once you've got a solid base in the formal.

I wanted to practice speaking informally because I visited my neighbors last weekend and they asked me something in really simple Japanese that I should have known, but I wasn't thinking in informal terms. He repeated his question several times and I thought about what he was saying, but I just couldn't get it. He shook his head and said it again in the formal way and I understood him immediately. I think he may have been upset that he had to talk up to a foreigner.

So today was my first really extended practice at informal Japanese. I think my problem is going to be that if I get used to speaking informal I'm not going to be able to differentiate when to switch and I might make someone mad. I've already been corrected once for using informal speach when talking to the Mayor. Luckily we're on good enough grounds...

Yumi, Takahiro, and I had plenty of time to talk because it's a little over an hour and a half ride into the city. In the car we talked about a lot of different things. Mostly music and language and culture things. Her husband is into Star Wars, but Yumi isn't really. She hasn't even seen Empire or Jedi!

When we arrived in the city I started to get anxious. The last time I was in the city was during orientation which was a couple of weeks ago. I almost forgot that something so big existed in my small part of the world. We were also in a different part of the city than I've been in. We were driving between several large office buildings and not in the middle of the shopping district. It really made me feel like I was at home. That is, until I looked to the left. There was a HUGE japanese temple looking thing, with the asian tiled slanted roof just out of the left window. I blinked and a huge office building once again obstructed my view.

"What was that?" I asked.

"Oh, there's a festival here today," they replied.

I looked out of the window again and there was indeed a festival outside of the window. That wasn't what I was referring to though.

"No the temple."

"It's a temple," they replied.

I don't think they realized how cool I thought the temple looked though, expecially in the center of a huge urban landscape.

We parked the car near the festival, which turned out to be a Japanese Cosmos Festival, with star-gazing and what not. We quickly walked through the festival and made our way through the string of shops that make up the shopping district of the city on our way to the movie theatre. I kept seeing shops I've never seen before, even though I know I've been on those streets before. There was an underground comics shop I hadn't noticed before. I don't mean independent I mean the shop was underneith a bunch of other ones. I really want to check that out next time I'm in the city. There were several very cool clothes shops that I hadn't seen before, and there was a biker shop we walked past that the singer from one of the bands we saw last month apparently owns.

The movie theatre was a lot like an American movie theatre, only much much smaller. There are around 10 movies playing in the one theater at a time, 2 on each floor of a 6 story building (with the bottom floor being the ticket seller and the movie trinket shop). We got in line to buy tickets for the 1:00 show. This is when I realized that Japanese movie tickets are 1800 yen. That's like $16.50 for a movie ticket, and that's during the day! No matinee in Japan! Oh well, it was too late to back out. So I handed them my money, got my ticket and headed onto the elevator.

On the elevator I asked if we were seeing the movie in English or Japanese. They said we were seeing it in English with Japanese subtitles. I was a little bummed, since I already knew the story and wanted to see what the Japanese voice actors sounded like, but not too bad. I asked them if Japanese people preferred dubbed or subtitled movies and they said that Japanese people prefer subtitled. I asked why, because Americans usually don't, and she said it's because it's more real. I guess I can buy that. It kinda makes me feel bad for switching on the dub when I watch japanese movies, but not too bad.

So we got upstairs to the movie theatre and I checked out the refreshment prices. They were a lot more reasonable than in America. Pretty much the same as if you were to buy a coke anywhere, Yumi told me that the sizes were a lot smaller though. I guess Japan is the opposite of America in this respect too. In America you pay about 4 times the amount you normally would for a coke for about two times the amount of coke, but in Japan you pay a little more than the normal amount for about half the coke.

We watched the movie and I couldn't understand a single subtitle other than "what?" and "why?". I understood what they were actually saying though, so that made up for it. It was funny to see Episode 2 in Japan because it's usually most criticized for its acting and it's terrible love scenes. In Japan they can't understand what the people are saying and they don't know if the delivery is genuine or not, so they've got the perfect angle from which to watch the movie! Noone laughed at all during the love scenes and there wasn't even a peep when Padme stands up perfectly ok after being blasted out of the huge battleship. In America the audience cracks up at these parts, but they don't understand why they're funny. I guess even Episode 1 was unanimously loved over here. They don't realize that Jar Jar is impossible to understand because even if they could make out his words they wouldn't understand them.

What did translate over surprisingly well were C3PO's puns near the end of the movie. This didn't make sense to me because they're all plays on American words. I guess the guy who wrote the subtitles knew what he was doing.

At the end of the movie most everyone sat around and waited for the last credit to roll. This is how people act in foreign movies in America too, and I just don't understand it. You can't even read the names! Why sit through the credits!

When we got out of the movie everyone went to the bathroom and we talked about how this Star Wars fits in with the rest of the series, the same conversation everyone has when they get out of a Star Wars movie. Yumi really liked Yoda. She was swinging an invisible lightsabre everywhere. She told her husband that she wants one and he said we can get you a fake one. She said "No way! I want a real one. I'll swing it around in Kedouin."

Yumi's crazy. I didn't have the heart to tell her that Yoda dies in Return of the Jedi.

On the way back to the car we went to a store called "What." No question mark. Just "what." It was amazing. If I have to liken it to anything it would be Urban Outfitters without clothing. They specialized in trendy everything. There was a foreign food section with taco stuff, bowtie pasta, actual pasta sauce, hershey's chocolate chip cookies, thai curry, A&W rootbeer, Dr. Pepper... everything! They even had American cleaning supplies like lemon Joy and Mr. Clean. Not bad. I bought a big plastic bowl (since all the bowls in Japan seem to be just a little bit too small), a Parappa the Rapper cell phone strap, some Thai Curry (to throw in my rice), some generic Post-it notes, and a Dr. Pepper. I WILL be going back though. That store was just too cool for my pocketbook though, as everything was way expensive.

On the way home we stopped off at an arcade, and after that we went to a Crepes place and got Crepes. The arcade was too redemption game based for my tastes, but Takahiro did win me a Totoro gift set for my birthday! I also tried out an arcade game where you walk a dog. There's a big treadmill and a leash that you could move left or right, and tug on to get the dog to go where you wanted it to go. It was fun, but way too much excercise!

That's it. If my trip to the city taught me anything, it's that I need to figure out how to get to the city on my own. There's just too much stuff I want to look at without a Japanese person's supervision, like the temple, the underground comic book store, and the many CD stores. Next time I'll have my camera too!