You know what they say about Kyoto

Yo. Sorry for the wait, it's been a busy week.
I'm trying to think of how to break the last week or so down. What's my essay structure? Got it.

General happenings:
If I was a terrible person I would describe this last week as "work hard, play hard". But I won't. In the days I've mostly been doing orientation stuff. In the nights I've mostly been doing drinking stuff.

Orientation consists in large parts of the international faculty packing into a lecture hall, being handed fliers and sheets, and then having the fliers and sheets read out to us for the next hour or so. So amongst such thrills as these, if I were forced to choose the keepiest of keepers the best of Orientation Week might include:

The religious matriculation ceremony in the College Chapel where we were reminded that Doshisha stands for CHRISTIANITY, LIBERALISM, INTERNATIONALISM, where a Japanese man who looked like a Bond villain joked that the only way to cure homesickness is to diligently study and we were assured how proud our parents are of us for being at Doshisha.





Going to get my 'Alien registration card', being told I could get a receipt for it, but because they were changing design I will have to wait a week to get it. They needed this at the phone shop to allow me to get a mobile - which, I will have to pay a cancellation fee at the end of the year if I choose not to get a prepay, but which will allow me cheap emails to non Softbank customers than the prepay option, though both include free emails to other Softbank customers - but obviously that does not include the fact that I am 19, hence legally a child in Japan, and therefore obviously requiring my Japanese student volunteer to adopt me. Long story short, I get my phone sometime next week and I am currently operating at 13% of maximum social capability.

On a slightly less sarcastic note, I didn't do brilliant on my placement test. I'm in group IV with a few other kids from Cambridge among others, some of my friends are in group V and VI. Group V would be a lot more preferable. Group IV expects us to know 800 kanji - the Chinese characters you need to know around 2000 of to read a newspaper - by the end of the year. It is intermediate, if not the beginning stages of intermediate Japanese. I've been at this level since halfway through my A2 year. I've improved only incrementally in the entire year I was studying at one of the best universities in the world. Incidentally, everyone from SOAS at Doshisha is in group VI or above. It's partly because I didn't revise at all for the placement test. It's partly because I'm rusty. It's partly because Cambridge provides no structure whatsoever for systematically learning vocabulary and characters and provides no tests until the end of the year. But frustratingly it is because I have not worked hard enough on my language skills and have been distracted by other interests, both academic and otherwise. This year I need to stop mixing metaphors and take the dictionary by its horns and take the last train to Studiesville.

The other frustrating thing about being in Group IV is that it really limits my choice of non-language papers I can sit. I thought I was going to be stuck doing Ikebana and British Popular Culture since the 70s. Fortunately, this is not the case, and here is where I get less stroppy. As part of the deal Cambridge has with Doshisha, that sees us getting significantly reduced tuition fees, we also get less credits to take classes with. In fact, once a specially negotiated dissertation workshop in the Spring term and extra language seminars are factored in, we only get three free non-language classes for the whole year. There are no classes I want to take that I can take as a level IV student. But at the start of the Spring term there will be another placement test where one can potentially move up to a higher group. This term I am taking no non-language classes at all. I can focus on getting good at Japanese and I will also have a lot of free time in which to read, write, explore Kyoto and campaign politically (Mr. Tadatoshi, the Deputy Director of the International Bureau of the JCP - is asking around the Kyoto office for someone to introduce me to, my friend in Tokyo has already given me the contact details of a Kyoto Komrade). Then next term, when I am to Japanese what Joseph Conrade was to English, I will be able to take Modern Japanese Literature, Japanese Dialects, and Japanese Politics, all taught in Japanese. So actually, as a great master of the Tea Ceremony once said "It's all Gravy".

As for drinking, it was often. That's what Japanese sentences are like. I'm always surprised by how much better Japan is than everywhere else. I kind of mean that quite specifically but also kind of generally. Kyoto is not meant to be cool. AH KYOTO'S SO PRETTY SO TRADITIONAL TEMPLES GEISHA SAMURAI WABI SABI わね！ That sort of thing. Osaka is cool. Osaka is where people drink and dance and dress well. But then you're reminded that the standards in Japan are just higher. Kyoto is comparatively not cool. But for that, it is absolutely packed with tiny hole-in-the-wall bars with loads of character, chatty barkeepers, good music and decently prices drinks. The average young person on a street in central Kyoto would be noticeably "fashionable" even by London standards. Japan, you're meant to be going through the worst recession of the last 50 years, you're meant to be stilted and repressed. You're doing it wrong! But yes, I've not been not drunk for quite a while. I'll keep you posted on how that's going. As for drinking, this it looks like.
















Interlude - Between whisky and academic bureaucracy I have found Philip Larkin. That book has nearly all his poems at little over 200 pages. Which is nice. I really like it. Which worries me a bit. It's all very conservative. Both the poetry and its form - what's all the rhyming malarky! Away with your established metre! And the author and his politics - he's grumpy, perpetually old, his dad was a Nazi and his letters show him to be a wee bit reactionary. And I am worried because I hope I'm not a closet traditionalist. Like, alright, I love T.S. Elliot (fuck, he's a righty too!), but I prefer the comparatively normal The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock to The Waste Land, and it's shamefully appealing reading Larkin and easily understanding, you know, what he means. I'll have to get my weird fix when I'm done with a bit of e.e. cummings. The first poem of his I really dug was this rather lovely number:

The horns of the morning
Are blowing, are shining,
The meadows are bright
With the coldest dew;
The dawn reassembles.
Like the clash of gold cymbals
The sky spreads its vans out
The sun hands in view.

Here, where no love is,
All that was hopeless
And kept me from sleeping
Is frail and unsure;
For never so brilliant.
Neither so silent
Nor so unearthly, has
Earth grown before.

-------------

I might get sued, because I had to type that out because it's nowhere good on the internet. But yeah, it turns out this is a particularly chirpy piece for him, as by and large, he's a miserable bastard. But I rate him for his ability to create morbid beauty in mundane events. And I pity him, because he wrote extraordinary poetry and lived a tiny, tiny life.

Back to out main feature:

I've been missing certain people at home a lot. Though I've been having lots of fun and I've been very busy, my emotional baseline is still very up-and-down shaky. There's concrete stuff about wanting to see certain people at home, then lots of vague abstract stuff about where I even consider my home, not being settled, etc etc. So I've been doing lots of thinking about that. But it is, slowly dawning on me, that whatever I may feel about it, I am here for a year. I miss London and Cambridge, I miss people in London and Cambridge, but the only thing to do about it is to make Kyoto better than London and Cambridge, more of a home than home, to be move active and productive here than I am there, to make this year amazing. I must find a new ICA and Indego Cafe, and while not forgetting about those I care about at home, I must develop real, close relationships out here. To this end, well, for one I need to get a phone. But otherwise, I've been researching and seeing what Kyoto has to offer. Fortunately, it has a lot. I have found two art-house cinemas, over 10 art galleries, including a Kaleidoscope Museum (with a 'make your own kaleidoscope class, of course) and a gallery in a forest in the montains, infinite small cafes and bars, 4 hot springs, 1 local Communist Party Office, 3 local vegetarian restaurants including a "Felafal Garden", a few live houses with local acts and I live next door to the Imperial Palace with pleanty of grass and trees to lean against and read and write, and by the Kamo river with big grassy banks packed with people picnicking, studying, and playing live jazz.

On the agenda coming up I have two elections, one for the Kyoto Prefectur Governor, one for the Upper House in the Diet.
A bit nearer - and here I'm partially doing this to have it all written up for nice, easy reference - I have

22.09.09 - Welcome to Doshisha Party
29.09.09 - Mama!milk, A great Kyoto band (check out 'Kujaku') who do atmospheric accordion jazz - at Urbanguild.
04.10.09 - Japan's largest vegetarian festival at Okazaki Park - it's bring your own cutlery.
24.10-09-23.12.09 - Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele and Viennese Art at the turn of the century exhibition at the Suntory Museum in Osaka. What! Having first become aware of their existence a few months ago, slightly lamenting not being able to go to Vienna before I left for Japan, it's now down the road. Marvelous.

That and looking for a job. So yes, I am going to intensely enjoyable activity myself out of the blues.

And then here are some pictures, for good measure.
Pretty river views.












A good sign.


Looking like American college students.


Take care, I'll maybe write more frequently now. But Oh My Days, I swear down, you have to comment this. This took me three hours to write.

Night night
xxx