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!

Return to Okayama, Part 1

~Hello, readers! I have survived my follow-up training in Okayama, albeit narrowly. Several weeks before the trip, company headquarters dispatched me a packet of information, including a checklist of items to bring on the trip. While going over the checklist with the staff at my school, my manager asked me why "casual clothes" were on the list. I explained that some people might want to leave the hotel after-hours to check out the town. This made my manager laugh...because, as she put it, the convention center that I'd be staying in is known among company staff as 'Alcatraz'. She said that it was on top of a mountain, surrounded by a shark-filled moat, and there was nowhere worth going to for several kilometers.

She was right:

^ A picture taken from on top of the mountain, outside of "Alcatraz'. In the center, you can see the moat-like river that surrounds the mountain. I could be wrong, but I think my manager was joking about the sharks.

^The name of the convention center that I had the dubious pleasure of staying at is called 'Yu Ai no Oka'. Wow, you get more than one Word of the Post! 'Yu' means friend, 'Ai' means love, and 'Oka' means 'hill'. You may remember from a previous post that 'no' means 'of'. Thus, 'Yu Ai no Oka' roughly translates to "Hill of Love and Friendship". Yu and Ai are also girls' names; there are several at my school (it's a lot of fun to say, "Hey, Yu!").

The more observant among you may notice that 'Oka' also appears in the word 'Okayama', the city that the hotel is technically located in. 'Yama' means mountain (we're up to four words now), hence 'Okayama' means 'Mountain Hill'. My theory is that the land around it wasn't tall enough to be considered mountains, but was too tall to be hills, so the founders compromised and included both.

^During the training, I got to see a lot of the people from my initial training group, which was a lot of fun. Still, the intensive training left us in 'zombie mode' most of the time. As I watched my comrades shuffle out of the room after one particularly gruelling training session, I had a disturbing thought. Here, we had hordes of mindless humans, inside an isolated, mountaintop hotel, with narrow corridors lit by with dim, naked lightbulbs. I realized that I was, in fact, on the set of...

^ RESIDENT EEEEVIL! I'm telling you, the setting was perfect. I half expected to wake up to a massive horde of bloodthirsty undead battling it out with Jill Valentine:

^YOU are next (redeye effect intentionally uncorrected)! Actually, to be honest, I wouldn't have minded some zombie madness to break up the monotony. I'm sure we could have MacGyvered some weapons out of locally available materials.

^After the speeches and model lessons were over, we did find some time to relax a bit. I heard a story about last year's training at this same location, when the trainers called a taxi, drove down into town, and loaded up on beer. When I asked them about this story, they would neither confirm nor deny it.

^Yu Ai no Oka was a bit ghetto for a hotel. For example, the showers were independent of the rooms and were only open for around two hours in the evening. The air conditioning in my four-person room was on the fritz, and you had to make your own bed and had to step outside to get to the closest bathroom. But I will say this: the food was fantastic, especially the breakfast. And it was free, which never hurts.

Another bonus was that the hotel provided yukata, which are Japanese-style light robes worn in the evening. Naturally, all of the guys put them on and began simulating lightsaber fights. Hey, we're teachers. We take our humor where we can find it (right, Stef?).

Here is some Japanglish I spotted while riding the bus back to the Okayama train station:

^ I think this sign was for a bar or club of some kind. Apparently, it's a cool place. Unfortunately, you can never see it. Oh well.

Tomorrow's post will be Part 2 of my Okayama trip, complete with more insane antics and pictures! Oyasumi~