The Great Japan/China Trip: Tokyo, Day 2

On our second full day in Tokyo, I met my boss and her family in the hotel lobby at 9am to get started on seeing as much as possible. First, we did as all tourists must do, and went to view the Imperial Palace, conveniently located only a few blocks from Tokyo Station. Although I’ve [...]

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The Great Japan/China Trip: Kyoto, Part I

Where was I? Oh, yes, our emergency hotel in Tokyo. As I mentioned, though, one of the best things about this hotel was its proximity to Tokyo Station, so the next morning it was no problem to get up bright and early, check out, and walk over to the station to catch one of the [...]

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Shocking Rudeness

A very bizarre conversation happened last night after karate class ended. The subject of my upcoming trip to Japan and China had come up, (since I’ll be missing the next 3 weeks of classes, but also because people were interested and jealous, neener, neener,) and the conversation took a turn that went like this:
Nearly College-Aged [...]

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Mild Annoyance Over Holidays

I find it kind of annoying that my Japanese-themed calendar* that I have on the bulletin board over my desk at work does not actually make note of any Japanese holidays. This has become an actual inconvenience because I am in the midst of coordinating a complicated group order of temari books and supplies from [...]

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Tea Ceremony: Live and in Books

This past Saturday, I filled in for one of my coworkers as the narrator (or commentator, as they seem to have listed me in the program) for a tea ceremony demonstration. Our department cosponsors this event with the university gardens every year in honor of the height of cherry blossom season. The ladies from the [...]

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How to Spot an Ex-JET

One of the graduate students in our program is coming in right now to help us with the undergrad study abroad files, which are kept in my office. As she picked up her stuff to go, she got out her cell phone, and it jingled in a very familiar way.
“Ooh! Which keitai straps do you [...]

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On Being a Foreign Woman in Japan

Synchronicity can be so weird. Less than a day after discussing how different the experiences of foreign men in Japan are from those of foreign women, I came across this passage in Kickboxing Geishas:
The truth is that in many ways, it was my own loneliness that drove me to write this book. Before I [...]

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On the Opinions of Celebrities

I just came across another bit in Kickboxing Geishas that caught my attention. In a later conversation with a Japanese woman about women in the modern workplace, the subject circles back around to what appears to be one of Chambers’ favored topics: role models. The woman she is talking to expresses some dissatisfaction with the [...]

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On the Pervasiveness of Sumimasen

From Kickboxing Geishas: How Modern Japanese Women Are Changing Their Nation, by Veronica Chambers. I knew I was going to like this book before it ever got around to discussing the actual topic of the book, because by page 3, I already found myself saying, “Yes, yes, absolutely, that’s what it’s like.”
I grew up in [...]

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Taking My Kitties to Work

When I lived in Japan, it was very much in fashion to have little dangly things on your cell phone. We JETs referred to them as “keitai straps,” keitai being the word for cell phone, but I have since been more properly informed that they are called netsuke. In any case, while I was there, [...]

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