Return to Okayama, Part 2

~Welcome to Episode Two of the Return to Okayama! Lately, I've been trying to learn some elementary kanji symbols, the Chinese pictographs that are one of the three written parts of the Japanese language. There are thousands and thousands of kanji, but knowing the "basic" 1,945 is sufficient to understand a Japanese newspaper (by law, any kanji in a newspaper outside of this set must include special identifying tags to help readers pronounce them). If you only know 1,000, you can still understand around 80% of a paper.

I know four (that's 0.2% so far! Only 1,996 to go!).

The first kanji I learned was the word for "person", which looks like this: 人. This one is easy to remember because it looks like the bottom half of a human body (or, more accurately, a person who has been sliced in half at the waist by an angry samurai). The next symbols I learned were "river": 川, "mountain": 山, and "hill": 丘. The thing to remember with kanji is that they represent both a thing (river, mountain, etc) and the Japanese word associated with that thing; thus, "山" means both "mountain" and the word "yama" (which of course means mountain). Therefore, the city of Okayama is written 丘山, and literally means "mountain hill".

^I posted this picture yesterday, but here it is again for reference. Although the symbols on this sign are very stylized, you can see the four symbols of "Yu Ai no Oka": 友愛の丘. Note that the symbol の is not a kanji, but is instead the hiragana symbol for the sound "no" (which means "of" in English). Confused yet?

I learned some kanji while reading a book in the lobby after a day of training :

^ This was our hangout at the hotel. On the left, you can see a couple of massage chairs that were broken (remember, this hotel was on the cheap side). At least, they felt like they were broken. I guess those chairs just aren't my thing.

^ There was also a group of Japanese teachers at the convention center who were there for company training. I learned a very interesting fact about my company while talking to some of them. You'll notice that both of the teachers in the above picture are female--of the dozens of Japanese teachers there, only one was male. In fact (and I found this rather shocking), in the entire company, there are only five male Japanese teachers. And of the nearly one hundred schools, only one manager is male (he's a bit of a legend, apparently). However, the director who gave a speech to us was male. And so is the company owner. Am I detecting a pattern here? At least among the foreign teachers, the gender ratio is more or less balanced.

^ After all that training, some of us felt the need to unwind a bit with some impromptu dancing. Or maybe that's just stretching after sitting in hard-backed chairs all day long.

^ A bonsai tree by night. The art of bonsai began over a thousand years ago in China and was heavily refined in Japan as an art form. While taking this picture, I couldn't help but recollect "The Karate Kid".

^ This little Fishkill Frog was basking in the glow of an electric light bulb on top of a sign outside the restroom. He was having quite a feast, thanks to the bugs attracted by the light. Clever girl...

Finally, what post would be truly complete without some Japanglish for you to laugh at?

^ I can only assume that this pharmacy specializes in aphrodisiacs. Either that or the person who put this sign up is telling us to really, really like drug stores.

~That's all from Okayama. Coming soon: Vending Machine Madness, Insane Super Express Trains, and ranting about movies! Speaking of movies, if you look on the right, you'll notice that I've added a link to Movies By Mike, so go check out his review of MI:3.

~Oyasumi!