Finals and Part-time Jobs

It feels like nothing particularly interesting has actually happened for me over the last week. This would appear to be because I'm getting used to the slightly weird life I am living (which seems to include bumping into Visual Kei bands in the middle of Harajuku...), rather than because nothing interesting has actually happened.

Firstly, finals week. I think I mentioned this at the end of my last post, so I'm sure you are desperate to hear what happened. Well, there were exams. And I went to them. That's about all, really...

Okay, not quite all. So, I don't think I've talked about the way exams work in Japan yet. Actually, I'm not sure if this is how all exams are. My Japanese language exams are the same as they were in England, and only one of my other modules had an exam. However, my International Relations exams seem to me to be the way exams work here. Basically, the exam consisted of somewhere between 25 and 50 multiple choice questions, and then a 1-2 page essay. For this, I had about two hours. Needless to say, I was out of the room in under half an hour. I am much more used to having two hours to write two or three essays, of three or four pages each. However, most of the people taking the course are Japanese students, so I guess it's difficult enough for them to understand the questions let alone answer them - I had trouble understanding the weird wording of some of the multiple choice questions after all.

What am I complaining about then, with such easy exams? To begin with, I don't actually recall complaining so far in this post... But any ways, the thing is that the pass mark here is a LOT higher than in England. So, English universities have 40% as the lowest passmark. 70% is the lowest mark you need to get the highest grade possible. Not so in this university! Here you need to get 70% to just get a C grade. This strikes me as terribly confusing and unfair... Anyways, now that I have actually complained about that, I will move on.

Now, with the end of term exams over, it is currently holiday - November break. Term will start again at the beginning of December, just in time to break up again for two weeks for Christmas... I seriously have no idea who came up with this 'logic'. Anyways, with the holiday approaching, I thought it might be nice to go someplace. Unfortunately, travel in Japan is a bit more pricey than in England, and I spent a considerable amount on bills at the start of the month. So in hope of earning enough to go visit friends in other parts of Japan, I did something I had never wanted to do. I have started tutoring English. Now, I like teaching some things. Archery, for example. However, I have very little patience to be a really effective teacher. But, there was no other option. There are websites which facilitate meetings between students and teachers, so I signed up to one of them. It appears having an English accent is quite a lure to some people, so I have had a bit of interest, and have had a couple of lessons. This seems to involve meeting some random Japanese person, usually a businessman, in some random coffee shop, and having awkward conversation for an hour, then being given however much money I decided in advance I would charge and trying not to grin too happily at the money... Then ending up spending most of it on groceries...

Needless to say, I have not saved up enough to go someplace. I haven't even really even earned enough to go someplace, even if I had saved all of it. However, the money I got made some things nicer, like the fact I was able to go to an all you can eat pizza place with my friends who had been begging me to go with them for weeks. I was a little unnerved to see that some of the pizza was topped in chocolate sauce and bananas, or in apple and cinnamon, but it was actually quite tasty. As was the unlimited tiramisu which was included in the whole thing. I did feel quite ill on leaving the restaurant though. And one of my friends seemed to have some strange problem of hearing jazz music in the restaurant, even though none was playing...

So, to continue in the, frankly disgustingly capitalist tone of this post, I would like to talk about money. Specifically money in Japan. See, I am always surprised, and a little irritated, by how much of a 'cash culture' Japan has. Now, I don't mean to say they don't use credit and debit cards. Lots of shops accept them, but I have rarely seen anyone actually use them, except for really big purchases. Japan is, as a lot of people are aware, one of the safest countries from petty crime, but still...

I will give you an example – bills. I have had to pay a depressingly large number of these since arriving. The fees for the dorm I'm living in, my mobile phone bill, my health insurance bill... The thing about all of these is that you pay them in cash. You can pay most of them at any convenience store, or post office, and conveniently, we have a post office right in the middle of our campus. Some people tried to pay by card, especially for the dorm fee, which was almost £2000 at the time due to horrible exchange rates but were told they had to pay in cash. No one wants to carry around that much money. Most banks wont even let you withdraw that much at one time. Still, cash it had to be.

In England, if you work in a shop and someone tries to pay for something with a £50 note, often what you are meant to do is call your manager, who will assess whether the note is real, or tell the customer that they don't accept £50s. That's because a £50 is much more likely to be fake. The only people who use £50s are tourists, and I really pity them for the trouble they will find trying to use one.

In Japan, the highest note I have seen is the 10,000 yen note, which right now is about £70. These are accepted everywhere. Even in a hundred yen shop, where you are only buying one thing, and want all that change back. Personally, I think they prefer that to when I go in and buy one thing with one hundred and five one yen coins (100 yen shops are actually 105 yen shops, after tax).

One yen coins are possibly the most useless thing ever. They are worth less than a penny and are made of recycled drinks cans. They are also the bane of everyone's wallet and the reason why cash based societies are always stressed. Although, there are special boxes you can buy to keep your 1 yen coins in. You can fit fifty in a box, and I've already filled one and am on my way through a second. Because you can't actually use these stupid pieces of fake metal anywhere, except the occasional shop where someone feels like being nice to you and pretending for a moment that they are anything other than a waste of everyone's space, time and drinks cans.

Anyways, I'll end here. Sorry for the lack of photos. I kinda forgot to take any over the last week, so busy with doing the incredible amount of revision I did. I really, really hope I'll end up doing something of interest over the next week, but probably all I'll do is sew plushies and try desperately to finish my 50,000 word novel by the end of November...

Finally here, after a arduous three week delay

Hello! So, you may have noticed that I haven't really posted anything for... a while. I think it's about three weeks.  While I'd like to blame this solely on being incredibly busy, sadly that just isn't the case. Not to say I haven't been very busy, but there have been evenings with me sat in my room when I totally could have written this, and just...didn't. Partly because I have a very short attention span, so concentrating for the hour or so necessary to write, edit and add photos to one of these can be a little taxing to my dominant childish side.

Also, every time I thought 'Hmm, I should probably write that blog entry now' I would remember something I had taken photos of recently, and that I had not yet uploaded said photos to my computer. I was therefore faced with the choice of leaving out the event, and having to explain why in a future blog, going through the arduous task of retrieving the cable to transfer photos from camera to computer from its usual hiding place (in plain sight, right next to my computer) and then wasting maybe even five of my oh so precious minutes transferring the photos... or putting off writing all together until I'd gotten round to sorting out photos at some mystical future point in time. I really do like making life difficult for my future self, whilst grumbling that past-me clearly had no consideration for others, or foresight.

So yes, lots to catch up on, because I know you have all missed my wonderfully dry witty comments on society, and my delightful Tokyo antics.

To begin with, I know I left some of you hanging with my last comment from the previous post - a tantalising glimpse at a weekend that I was very excited about. I know there are some who have been dying to know what happened, and what had made me so excited - it's alright, you don't need to hide your anticipation, you're with friends now. So, the weekend started off with the Canada House Ball on the Friday. This was a party held by Canada House, which is one of the all-male dorms on campus. They had dressed the place up to look like a club, and there was an outside area as well, where the performances happened. Now, I was running a little low on money at this point, and so had resigned myself to not buying any drinks whilst there. But then a pre-party party happened in one of the units in Global House... Anyway, when the Global House group arrived, I'm fairly sure we made the whole party about ten times livelier. From what I could see, people were talking when we arrived, but no one was dancing, except us. Now, there are about sixty people in Global House, and whilst not all of them went to the Ball, enough did to make it a very successful dorm invasion.

The Ball was awesome, and the performance by Smooth Steppers (the ICU dance club who are all made of pure, solidified awesome) was incredible, but I get tired of dancing quickly, and after bothering as many of my friends who I could find, I decided to call it a night.

Saturday was basically just filled with me lazing the day away in my room. Nothing particularly awesome happened that day.

Sunday, however, was one of the best days, possibly of my whole life. Now, I really like a certain type of Japanese music called 'Visual Kei'. It's very unique to Japan. Basically the idea is, that the bands don't just provide music to please your ears, but a complete aesthetic experience. Basically, this means they dress up in awesome costumes and act very over-dramatically on stage which, as those of you who know me well will understand, is something I fully support, on stage and off stage.

On that Sunday, there was a music festival, called the V-Rock Festival. It was a little way out of Tokyo, so meant an early start. I went with two of my friends, who also like V-Kei. This was the first and only music festival I have been to, and was AWESOME! All my favourite bands were there. In fact, most of the really famous ones were there. Name dropping time for anyone who knows Japanese bands, or wants to look some up: The artist GACKT, the bands Versailles Philharmonic Quintet, Golden Bomber, Ali Project, Girugamesh (which should have been Gilgamesh, but turns out they didn't do enough research into the proper spelling of characters in Mesopotamian mythology. Honestly, some people...), Mucc, SuG, Matenrou Opera... I'll stop there, because there were almost thirty acts. It was impossible to see all of them, but luckily none of my favourites clashed with each other - my favourites being GACKT, Versailles and Golden Bomber.

Wooo, look, a sign!

Golden Bomber is a recent interest for me - I only found out about them about two weeks before the festival. They are unique amongst V-Kei bands in that they don't even pretend that they play their music live. In fact, although it is written by them, they openly admit it was recorded by professional musicians, although I believe the singer sometimes sings live. They are the first, and only, 'air' V-Kei band. I think they are satirising bands who mime on stage rather than playing live, but they also seem to just be messing about. The live show I saw included someone doing a 'guitar solo' - which for them equated to speed eating corn on the cob, and someone having a shower on stage, because he felt the venue was a bit too warm. I almost hurt myself laughing, and was very surprised by the amount of the Japanese I could understand.

So, moving on from pretty Japanese rock stars, to the following weekend. Now, in most high school anime, and in Japanese TV dramas set in high schools, at some point there is a 'cultural festival', where each class and each club has a cafe, or food stall, or performance to attract attention to them, or raise money. Turns out universities have them too, and that was what the last weekend in October consisted of. It was absolutely awesome, and there were far more types of tasty food on offer than I could afford or manage to eat, but I tried a few. I was also helping out with a cosplay cafe, the costume for which arrived the day before the festival, thanks to my awesome parents.

Wandering around in cosplay in Japan is very different to in England. It's less intimidating here, although that might just have been because there were other people in weirder outfits running around. I would probably feel pretty out of place wandering into a supermarket on a normal day dressed like that. I had a couple of people ask if I was dressed as Alice in Wonderland, for an early Halloween celebration, which I actually hadn't thought of using the costume for, so that was fun.

Personification of Belarus, or Alice in Wonderland?
Who knows, but I certainly didn't see any rabbits that day...

And on to last weekend - I'm almost there! Thanks for staying with me on this! In Tokyo, there is a place called Ikebukuro, in Ikebukuro there is a shopping centre thing called Sunshine City, and in Sunshine City is a place called Namja Town (I suddenly feel like I'm writing a children's book...). I'm still not sure what to define Namja Town as, even though I have been there. It is a bit like a theme park, without any rides, but with lots of food. This is a theme I seem to have noticed in Japan - the cultural festival was all about the food booths, with maybe one game booth, and one garage sale type booth, unlike in England where those would be the norm.

We had barely left the station, when we had to make an emergency stop off at a Japanese bank. The reason for this was that I was very low on cash, but luckily had some English money. The on-campus post office had refused to change it, as the £20 note I had wasn't in their book of 'recognised English currency'. The picture of a £20 that they had is in fact one that is now out of circulation, and although I tried to explain this to them, there was no way they would believe me, so I had to brave the bank. Situations like this are what restore my faith in being able to cope in this country. I may get bored in Japanese class, and struggle to remember the vocab, but I can walk into a Japanese bank and, with no help from anyone else, understand what I am being told, and walk out with my purpose accomplished, having changed my money, and therefore being able to afford a train ticket back home.

Back to Namja town. You pay 300 yen to get in - which is about £2.50 at the moment. Inside it is pretty much a maze. The official guide book admits such and warns parents to keep their children near them. Currently, possibly due to Halloween, there is a ghost hunting theme, with games you can play involving searching for ghosts with sensor things (the 'ghosts' are in fact carefully 'hidden' electric devices that probably do something like bounce the signal back at you). The walls are full of posters that look like they could have come from America or England during one of the World Wars.

Whatever the Namderbirds are, they are apparently here to protect us. Yay?

Whilst there are food places scattered liberally around, the main ones are concentrated into 'savoury' and 'sweet'. My idea of going straight to Ice-cream City was vetoed by the people I was with, so instead we went to Gyoza Town. Gyoza are very tasty dumplings, which weren't nearly as expensive as I expected. There was also a rogue sweet shop that I expect was only let in because it fitted with the traditional theme of that specific area, but it had very cheap, very tasty sweets, so I will forgive them for trespassing into the domain of the savoury.

Then to Icecream City, where I actually didn't have any ice-cream, although I definitely plan to next time I go. I did, however, take pictures of some of the odder flavours they were selling, including garlic flavour, cheese flavour, sunflower flavour, eel flavour and, my personal favourite, mysterious fruit and chocolate flavour (no really, that was its official name...)

Apparently Dracula endorses the Garlic ice-cream.
Also, wasabi ice-cream (the green label)? Really? Isn't there enough despair in the world already?

Right next to the land of ice-creamy wonderment was a large arcade, which contained the real reason for us going there. One of my friends is fairly obsessed with a game series called 'Persona'. The fourth game is currently being made into an anime, which she had got me watching. In this arcade was a Persona 4 themed purikura (sticker pictures) booth. It was a touch more expensive than normal purikura, and you didn't get to decorate your pictures afterwards, but we all agreed it was worth it. I then beat one of my friends at air hockey.

The only other thing of interest that has happened is not Japan related at all. November is National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, where people worldwide are challenged to write 50,000 words of the novel they have bubbling away in the back of their head. I have been trying to complete this for three years - with a new story idea each time, and although I have fallen a bit behind, I really want to finish it this year. Finals are next week though, so things may get a little stressful over here in Camp Hazel, and due to that and my recent track record, don't expect regular updates of this blog. But there again, you never know. I do delight in being unpredictable after all...