First day of School: A 9/11 Emergency!

For 9/11 2006 in Japan it was tough in many ways. Starting with it being 9/11, the Japanese recognize it as an American tragedy. There isn’t a big vigil or anything just a mention of it on the news. While I know for Americans the memorial is tomorrow, I can’t help but think about the tragedy when I look at the date on my bus ticket.

Besides that a more pressing issue on my mind was the first day of school. Yes, today marks my first day of School at Hokusei Gakuen University (北西学園大学). To say that the day was rough is an understatement! It was like going back to the first day of elementary school… However this time I fretted more about the route there then the class!

Several Important Questions passed my mind as I traversed this mysterious and complex transportation system. Questions like:

“Is this a bus stop? (バス停)” or

“I hope this bus is going to the right subway! (新札幌駅)

“Jee… When do I get off this subway line?”

“man.. look at all the black hair, Japan sure has a lot of Japanese people!”

luckily my host father came with me up until my train stop then I was on my own. So naturally as I exited Oyachi Station I asked myself, “Ok now what?!”

For about 10 minutes I was lost, then I recognized a 100 yen shop and I was on my way to school! YYYYOOSH!

The first day for me consisted of Japanese class and that’s was it. However Japanese class is about 3 hours long with a 10 minute break. By far this was a long day… I can’t imagine what it will be like when I sign up for more classes.

I am supposed to get 4 books for this class and the sum total is about 100 bucks US. Luckily I got it but that’s just for Japanese class. The electronic dictionary helps when doing homework though. Good thing I got that. Yesterday I got a Canon C50 Wordtank.. This thing is a beauty! My Secret Weapon against the Japanese!

However today the bookstore was closed, but that didn’t stop me from exploring. Today I got myself a subway pass worth 3300 yen (1 way in a subway is 280 yen) and I went exploring to the groovy ward of Otari (Sapporo’s City Center) There I meandered through the many shops in the subway station. After what seemed like hours of walking I went to the surface to find the JR Radio Tower; A wonderful grand tower that towers over the ward. There was fountains and street venders and sorts. There were plenty of big sky scrapers and people too. It was fantastic!

5:00 pm rolled around and I decided to go home. I found that rush hour in Sapporo doesn’t happen on the streets, but in the subway. They didn’t shove me in, but there were a lot of people! It was hard to find a seat for most the trip. I was headed to Shin Sapporo Station from Otari which is a long ride on that thing! Sure enough I got to the shin-sapporo station. Now it was time to find the bus… Earlier my host father suggested either bus stand 9 or 10 so I stood at terminal 9 hoping that this next bus would take me there. Knowing me though, I couldn’t stand * just * not knowing which bus to take so I asked a nice Japanese man if he’d tell me what stop to get off at. He did, he told me bus 26 and then made sure, on the way to the stop, that I got off at the right place. The bus trip cost: 200 yen

(*note: all of this interaction was performed in Japanese!)

Now that I was in the right neighborhood, you’d think it’d be easy to find my house.. Yeah right. Ya see the neighborhood is split into sections, and these sections are broken into blocks, and the streets here are NOT labeled. Should I repeat that? NOT LABELED. Not even an innocent bi-standard on the street could help me find the house. All he knew was that it was on the east side not the west side of the neighborhood. So I started searching, walking endless streets and looking at all the houses for a sign. It took about 15 minutes until I found what I thought to be my house and I checked the name: 室谷 (Murotani) YATA! As soon as the name matched up I recognized it as my house, like a key to the mind. I walked in and said with a confident holler, “TADAIMA” or “I’m home.” Kei (my host brother, 13) greeted me, along with two of his friends. He was wearing the Mariner’s tee-shirt I had gave him with “Ichiro” on it.

The Ordeal was over, I was home. I went to my room and laid there… happy I’d got home.

Pretty cool eh?

Before I go I should tell my readers I have a new cell phone now. It’s the Sanyo W33SA/SAII the advanced spec sheet could be seen here: http://www.au.kddi.com/english/product/lineup/w33sa/index.html Briefly this nifty model comes equipped with:

T.V. (6 channels); FM Radio; Mp3 player; Video Player (avi); Camera w/flash; flashlight; JP-EN & EN-JP Dictionary; Calendar; Email; The Internet; and a photo-kanji recognition system (PKRS). (What’s a PKRS? It works with the camera. You see a kanji you don’t recognize or understand and you point this thing at the kanji. A box comes up and identifies the kanji and then translates it into hiragana or katakana characters which you then can put into the built in JP-EN dic and quickly understand the kanji. All of it takes about 30 sec to identify and then translate into english.

What you say? T.V.? Camera With Flash? A Photo-Kanji Recognition System?! No way! That musta cost a fortune! Nope it cost 1 yen. The charger cost more then the freak’n phone! How did I get it? Well the family started a phone family plan here that costs roughly 26 bucks US a month. They wanted me to have a phone to call them if I’m going to be late. Technology doesn’t get better then this thing! I was just surprised it had T.V. but the analog t.v. here is free so the service is free too. All I can say is SUU-GEI (that’s impressive in JP) it’s hard to put it down.

All I wanted was a cell phone and what I got was crazy Japanese tech!

Well time to finish my homework (shuu-ku-dai) it’s not much, but it’s gotta get done.

Ja mata~

~J out