By the south end of “Big Bird,” the JAL terminal at Haneda Airport in Tokyo, I spotted this:
This is where the Grand Poo-Bahs go to board their airplanes. Have I just found a totally awesome paparazzi perch? Or is this the future I have to look forward to when they elect me Prime Minister?
I’m taking an overnight trip out of town in a couple of weeks, and I decided to book a room in a “business hotel” online. Some of these places are surprisingly cheap: you can stay in the middle of a big city for as little as $40 a night or even less.
Then, I got this email:
Thank you for your reservation at ____ Hotel. We are contacting you because of a matter of importance for our customers from overseas.
At ____ Hotel, our rooms are secured at night with an automatic lock system and PIN pads. While the PIN pad system is very convenient, it is also complicated, and among our customers who are not particularly proficient in Japanese or have difficulty understanding Japanese, many have been unable to use the system, or have been locked out of their rooms at night.
Because of this, we ask all customers who do not speak Japanese to provide a translator at check-in when possible. After one stay the system is fairly easy to use, but as we cannot verify that you, Mr. Joe [sic], have stayed with us before, we are sending this message to you. Thank you for your understanding and cooperation.
Yet another reason I need to naturalize and change my name to Joichi Koizumi.
Update: I was thinking about this over a slow afternoon in the office, and I started wondering: “What would Debito do?” (Somehow he works his way into all of my blog posts.) So I wrote back to the hotel:
Thank you for your e-mail. I live in Japan and work as a translator, so I don’t think there will be any problem. One thing I do wonder about, though, is whether you have had instructions written in English? Many hotels and weekly mansions in Tokyo have similar systems, and they provide instructions in English so that foreign customers do not have to worry about misunderstanding. Maybe something similar would save you from having to send out these warnings (and also be more convenient for your guests who don’t speak Japanese).
The hotel manager wrote me back within ten minutes.
Thank you for your reply. We do indeed have an English version of the instruction sheet you suggested in your e-mail, so please don’t worry about that. Our customers are not generally from the English-speaking world, thus the e-mail you received. Thank you again for your comment, and we hope you have a safe trip.
Sooo, that’s that. I guess the interpreter is only necessary if you can’t read.
Good morning, Frogheads! I got back to Tokyo earlier this week, but thanks to my school’s very poor taste in temporary housing, I haven’t been able to get online. Fortunately there are Hotspots all over the place, so all hope for blogging hasn’t been totally lost. I’m currently reporting to you live from a Mos Burger overlooking the Yamanote Line, or “the ringworm of Tokyo” as Adamu calls it.
I had a different experience arriving at Narita this time, because I did it without a visa. It’s not that I was too stupid or lazy to get one; there were circumstances. Continue reading Entering Japan, refugee-style
Just a few days away from returning to Japan. While visiting a war museum in Charleston yesterday, I spotted these names painted on a WWII-era dive bomber:
Obviously, it’s a list of islands that the plane bombed. But I can’t help but think… if you put it in Book Antiqua with some nice photos, it could just as easily come from a cruise line brochure. Stick Honolulu on top and Yokohama on the bottom and you’ve got a nice little Hawaii-Japan trip.
(More profound blog posts coming soon, I promise. Still a little fried from cramming for my tax exam…)
After a longish absence from this space, I’m going to resume posting. Although I returned from Manila to Taipei last Thursday at around 5pm, I’ve put off writing anything here for a few extra days to collect my thoughts a bit, and more importantly to do the things I actually had to do here. And there’s another reason. On the evening of my third or fourth day in The Philippines I went to an internet cafe and wrote a fairly long blog post on my initial impressions, which vanished into the ether as the computer crashed at the exact instant I pressed the send button. This occurrence generated a fair amount of both resentment and apprehension, which collectively prevented me from even attempting to post again until I was safely back at my own, stable computer.
First, a brief itinerary.
November 25: 9.30AM flight from Taipei’s Chiang Kai Shek airport to Manila’s international airport. Upon landing I find a payphone to call my friends, quickly tire of the exorbinant rates, and instead buy a SIM card from a nearby vending machine and pop it into my Taiwanese cell phone, giving me a real phone number for my two week stay. This makes my life several times easier. I meet my friends Beth, and later Arlo as well, we have dinner and Beth takes me to an apartelle near both of their homes (University of the Philippines “Teacher’s Village” region, Quezon City, Metro Manila.) The room is scummy but cheap, and the area is fairly nice, as well as quiet and safe.
Following this I spend a few days in Manila (often technically Quezon City, which is part of Metro Manila), sometimes with my friends and sometimes wandering around alone.
December 1: Fly from Manila’s domestic airport (next to the international one) to Iloilo City, where I meet two other friends. Stay the night in a ‘pension house,’ a strangely British sounding term I’ve never encountered before which seems to mean motel.
December 2: With my friend, take a bus from the south to the north end of the island (five hours), and then a ferry from the port to Boracay.
December 4: The reverse of the above trip.
December 5: Afternoon flight back to Manila, meet my two Iloilo friends for lunch first. Instead of returning to the previous Quezon city acommodations, I find the International Youth Hostel listed in Lonely Planet, which is only a few minutes from the airport. This will make my morning trip to the airport the day after next several times simpler.
December 7: Fly back to Taipei.
I know this isn’t the most enthralling travel log, but I have several posts on the Philippines coming up over the next couple of weeks. A few of the topics I plan to post on (some writing, some photos) are:
Magellan’s ignominous end in the Philippines
Filipino Overseas Workers
Japan in the Philippines
Language in the Philippines
The Chinese Cemetary in Manila
Intramuros
I’m writing this at 9.20pm, Taiwan time, in an internet cafe in Shida night market. No, I’m not out in a net cafe just to ease myself into the feeling of traveling before I actually depart. Yes, I do own my own computer here, currently located and fully operational in my own apartment. What is not working is my internet connection. For some reason unknown to me or my flatmates, the phone/DSL line went completely dead last night, and between final exams in my Chinese class yesterday and today and an early morning flight there was just no time to wait for a repairman. This internet cafe is called Concept, but as far as I can tell the only concept they had in designing this place was “take a basement room and plaster it with World of Warcraft posters.
I’ll be leaving on a 9.30am flight tomorrow (Nov 25), Taiwan’s Eva airlines from Taipei’s Chiang Kai Shek airport, to Manila, Philippines. Returning at the same time, December 7th. Everything in between is a little up in the air.
I have several friends in the Philippines that I’ll be visiting, all Philippinos who I met while I was living in Kyoto. Of the five people I expect to meet up with, three were students at Ritsumeikan with me (two exchange students and one graduate student), and two were graduate students at Kyoto University, that I met through my Philippino friends at Ritsumeikan, who they knew from home.
Some of these friends I’ll be seeing in Manila, and one (or two, if she can go), I’ll be meeting on Boracay Island. Rocs (the friend I will be meeting there) tried to book a flight for me for this weekend, but it was too short notice, so instead I’ll arrange one for the following weekend after I arrive in the country. Although next weekend is more convenient in terms of time, this weekend would have been much better from a financial perspective. Rocs tells me that following December 1st, when the tourist season starts, prices for accomodations will double.
Aside from that, I have very little idea of exactly what I’ll be doing while I’m there. I’m sure Manila will be interesting for a couple of days at least, and Arlo was telling me that there are some nice places to visit not too far from Manila. Since I was unable to actually find an English language guidebook in the stores here-plenty of guidebooks, but no Philippines book in stock-and also haven’t had much time to read up online (particularly in light of domestic service outage).
I’ve backed very light. I borrowed a smallish hiking backpack from my flatmate Steph-larger than my schoolbag, but much smaller than the orange monster I used to hike around China. I’ve packed a few days of clothes, my camera, a few minor items, and a few books. The books mainly consist of a couple of Japanese language history books on Taiwan. This is a space saving strategy, as English books take far, fare less time to read, and even one large book in English would weigh a few times as much as two slim Japanese paperbacks. Of course, since the entire educated population of the Philippines is fluent in English, I may pick up some local histories or novels in the English language, so I can actually know something about the country I’m in.
I don’t feel particularly nervous about my lack of preparation for the trip, and my lack of any real knowledge about where I’m going. A lot of people say that the Philippines is a dangerous country to travel in, but I think it should be a lot safer ever since they locked up Commander Robot. Is my lack of stress merely the calm before the storm, a lack of human emotions, or simply exhaustion from the dozen or more trips I was forced to make to various Taiwanese offices and burueas over the past three weeks to get my Taiwanese residence visa and reentry permit, so I would actually be able to come back into the country on the return leg of my trip instead of having to live like Tom Hanks in that that silly movie about the airport?
First, let me tell you why I’m writing this: THE HYPE SURROUNDING PHILLY CHEESE STEAKS IS A LIE AND MUST BE STOPPED. They are disgusting and deserve none of the fame that they have gained. Now let me explain:
I recently had the chance to visit beautiful Philadelphia with Mrs. Adamu. The first capital of the United States includes a major monument to its role in the American Revolution in the center, which was certainly very impressive but not quite impressive enough to actually make me wait in line to see the liberty bell. Mrs. Adamu and I were soon bored, on our way home we decided to try the famous Philly Cheese Steak at Geno’s Steaks in South Philly — the biggest mistake I’ve made in a long time.
I felt betrayed as soon as I took the first bite and was greeted with hot blandness. All the hype, all the anticipation amounted to this:
Listen to the ingredients: Steakums, cheez whiz, and chopped onions on a soggy Portuguese roll. WTF? That’s it? This is the same crap I’ve been heating up in the microwave as a last resort food for years! What gives, Philadelphia??
The only thing that made it edible was the hot sauce that was available in the condiments section. At least then there was something to taste.
Initially I blamed myself. Had Japan tainted my taste buds so that I can no longer enjoy classic American food? Mrs. Adamu, a native Japanese, supported this initial suspicion. But then, no, I reasoned, I still like root beer, cheeseburgers and pancakes, so I must still be American enough to have an objective opinion.
So how could this have happened? Millions of people must be cheated out of their money each year based on the false assumption that something is different about Steakum sandwiches in Philadelphia. What a scam.
Clearly the cheese steaks are popular — there were stands all over the historical district and both Geno’s and the place across the street were lined up. Why weren’t more people spitting out their food and demanding their $6.50 back? I mean that’s a lot to pay for what’s basically the equivalent of peanut butter and jelly.
The answer came to me in a message from God. Without warning someone in a car shouted “NAZI FUCKS!!!!” in our general direction and sped off. Were they talking to me? (I shave my head so who knows) I looked around:
(Read here for more about this guy and Mumia)
(Note the tribute to 9-11 next to the Freedom Fries — aside from us and some other tourists, the rest of the customers were cops and firemen)
It was at once obvious that this place that serves its dubious delicacies with a heaping help of local pride and admiration for the most prominent local heroes, cops and firemen. These people don’t come here for good food, they come here because it’s part of their identity.
Now, that’s all well and good, but why must cheesesteaks then become something pawned off on unsuspecting out-of-towners? Perhaps because without cheesesteaks and the liberty bell, there isn’t exactly much to differentiate Philly from, say, Boston, DC, or other second-tier American cities. Yet I can’t accept the idea that any claim to fame is better than none. You might as well brag about having the world’s best green beans. These things are BLAND, BORING, AND SHAMEFUL. All Philadelphians with any self-respect would do well to shut these scheisters down before they can do any more harm. Besides, I hear they’re run by Nazis.
I’m dead tired. I arrived in Newark airport at about 10pm New York time tuesday night. Boarding at 12.30 Five hour flight to Seattle. Two hour wait. Twelve hour flight to Taipei’s Chiang Kai Shek airport, arrival 7.30am. Bus to Taipei station. On the way I pass Mosburger several times. Mosburger is the Japanese answer to McDonald’s, and the absolute unrivaled king of burger-form fastfood. Not aware that it existed anywhere outside of Japan I am thrilled far out of proportion to the actual significance of this discovery.
Arriving at the train station it takes me a few minutes to figure out exactly where the hostel is. Thirteenth floor of a building, above an electronics mall with Acer, Apple, iRiver, Asus, MSI, BenQ stores is not the place one you would expect to find a youth hostel, but when they said “right across the street from Taipei main station” they meant it-doubting only causes me to walk back and forth a few times, the strap of my portable computer carrying case wearing out my shoulder muscles.
I check in, I prepaid on the internet but I don’t have an Internation Youth Hostel membership card so I give him a few dollars to register for one of those before I’m allowed in. I’m sharing a room with a couple of Japanese guys who just arrived from Korea and leave for the Phillipines in a week. They are planning to travel all the way around the world. “How long will it take”, I ask.” Hmmm, maybe a year”, Ohta ventures. Clearly their plans are not fixed. I ask what their plan for the day is? “I think we’ll go see this”, he says. “What?” I ask stupidly, when I realize he is wearing a yoda shirt, and his friend (whom I think is named Kobayashi) has Darth Vader on his chest. “Ah yes, I saw that last week. Definitely better than the last two. But of course, if you’re enough of a fan to wear a t-shirt there’s really no question about going is there?”
I go to take a shower. Slightly confused at first, as the toilet stalls and shower stalls are the very same. Let me be clear, because I thought my eyes deceived me at first. The shower is mounted above the toilet, and the toilet seat becomes soaked as you shower next to it. I suppose it’s an efficient use of space, but I am a little shocked. This design would be anathema in Japan, where they don’t generally even allow the toilet and shower to be separate stalls in the same room, much less so… interactive.
I go down the block to the subway station, and look around the underground bookshop for a while before I go into the purchase area. I’m pleased to see that a moderately sized general bookstore has specifically marked off sections for fantasy and science fiction. It is all in Chinese, but I notice that much of it is translated from Japanese authors, and probably most of the rest from western languages. I also note that there are books in English scattered throughout the store, mixed in with the appropriate topical section, not segregated in an English corner. I recall what I had read about the linguistic history of Taiwan. Originally inhabited by aborigines speaking Pacific island languages, Fujianese and Hakka settlers from southern China, colonization by Dutch, expulsion of the Dutch and a larger influx of Chinese, speaking a mix of southern dialects. Annexation by Japan around turn of 20th century, imperial rulers gradually implement replacement of Chinese with Japanese, particularly effective in education and literary worlds-for a time in the 30’s and 40’s even native Taiwanese are writing literature in the Japanese language. Following Japan’s defeat in the second world war Taiwan is given to the Republic of China, the government of which decides to supress Japanese as well as all non-Mandarin dialects, a policy which continues in full force until the 80’s and I believe is still gradually leveling off. The author’s theory seemed to be that the history of language on Taiwan has led to a culture in which many people have a more relaxed distinction between native and foreign languages. I consider that a single bookstore in which English books are shelved alongside Chinese books does not make for a broad sample.
I first visited China in March of 2003 during the between semester break of Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, Japan where I was studying at the time. I never wrote much about that trip, but my fellow traveler Chris Gunson, who was also studying at Ritsumeikan as an exchange student from Rutgers, has a good account of the entire journey (illustrated with my photographs and his maps) on his website at www.cgunson.com/china/. At the time I know no Chinese at all, and although Chris had taken a little Chinese in high school he couldn’t actually speak it to any degree, just understand a few words and read or write simple sentences. Since we were both students of Japanese, which has a writing system largely based on that of Chinese, we could read a decent number of words in much the same way that a reader of English can make out some Spanish or German words on a page, and traveling all the way across a country as large as China with only these limited communication skills to rely upon was part of the fun.
Still, after spending about three weeks in China without the ability to communicate with a single taxi or bus driver, the servers in any but the best restaurants, the ticket sellers at the train station, or any other local people aside from the rare college student, unable to watch tv, read the newspaper, and so on I thought that it might be fun to learn Chinese and someday return with the ability to do all of those things and more. Ordinarily this would seem like a mildly nutty decision, but since I was already living in Japan studying that language it hardly seemed unreasonable. During the following semester in Japan, my second, I made arrangements to stay for a second year so when I returned home to the States that July it was only for summer vacation and not for good. When during the summer I stopped by my home university, Rutgers to see some people and take care of some things, I dropped by the university bookstore and bought the textbook used there for elementary Chinese.
When I went back to Ritsumeikan I started to study the book with the help of a girl from Shanghai that I was friends with, but just doing a little bit every week I didn’t really get very far, and she was impressed enough that my pronounciation was less awful than that of Japanese people that she knew studying Chinese that she didn’t worry much about my general slow progress, and when we both ran out of time to study together I set aside Chinese study for a while.
About a year after my first trip to China I went again. This time I was traveling alone much of the time, instead of wandering aimlessly I was visiting friends that had studied with my in Japan, and the trip was capped by a journey from China into Kazakhstan. I originally created the first version of this site to document that trip, and part of those journals are preserved in early entries on this blog. Here are some of them.
2004 travel journal
HK part 1
HK part 2
HK part 3, etc.
Shekou
Shenzhen
Beijing
Yonghe Gong (Former palace in Beijing converted into Tibetan Buddhist temple)
Tiananmen
The Summer Palace and lost on the way there.
I never actually wrote an adequate account of the trip out west and to Kazkahstan, but there are a number of photographs in my gallery section, as well as of all sections of China that I visited.
On this trip to China I actually brought my textbook with me and tried to study a bit while I was traveling, but time was short and my level was so low that I gave up quickly and just enjoyed myself, and resolved to actually register in Chinese class when I returned to Rutgers in the fall. I had also been studying a little bit of Korean on the side at Ritsumeikan, with the help of a Korean girl that I was dating at the time and actually ended up registering for both Chinese and Korean 101 for the fall semester. (Sidenote, I stopped in Seoul for a few days on the way home from Japan. My travelogue from that time is located here and here)
I had assumed that because Japanese and Korean have such similar grammar and use Chinese loanwords in such a similar way, and because it uses a fairly easy phonetic writing system instead of thousands of characters that it would be easier than the tonal Chinese language to learn, but over the course of the semester I was surprised to find that while I had to study mindlessly for hours to memorize Korean vocabulary, after having already spent years memorizing Chinese characters for reading Japanese, Chinese class was by far the easier of the two. Studying two languages at elementary level at the same time was kind of inconvenient, so next semester I just stuck with Chinese so I could properly concentrate.
Around the middle of that final semester, one day in class my Chinese teacher handed me an application for a Taiwan government scholarship to study Chinese in Taiwan. “Do you have any plans for the summer yet?” she asked, adding “the application is due tomorrow.” Not even remotely having and fixed plans for after graduation I brought the application back the following day, and a couple of weeks found out that I had got the scholarship, which is $25,000 New Taiwanese Dollars (about 30 to one $US) per month, which will be placed in the care of the school in Taiwan at which I study for me to get when I arrive. What’s that? Although I was assured money to study in Taiwan, I hadn’t actually registered for an actual course of study yet, so I scrambled to get together the application forms for that, which in addition to the standard teacher recommendations also required a physical and HIV test (negative of course). The people in the scholarship office made it clear that scholarship recipients were guaranteed admission to the program of their choice, of course phrased a bit subtly. After looking over the various options I opted for the Mandarin Training Center at National Taiwan Normal University, in Taipei.
My flight leaves tonight (technically tomorrow’s calendar date) at thirty minutes past midnight. It flies first to Seattle, then I transfer for another twelve hour flight to Chiang Kai Shek international airport in Taipei. The scholarship provides me money that is expected to be used for tuition, rent and other expenses, but it actually only lasts for three months while I’m going to be staying for at least six, so I need to make up for the shortfall out of my own pocket, partly through some money saved and partly through the freelance Japanese to English translation that I have been doing part time for about three quarters of a year, and can carry on doing anyplace where I have a decently stable internet connection. Because the school dorm is for some arcane reason not avaliable to recipients of this particular scholarship program (incidentally, a rule that I also saw in Japan, which caused great inconvenience for at least two international students that I knew), I will be staying in a youth hostel (conveniently located across from the main Taipei train station) for the first few days while I try and find some accomodations on my own. Since the campus is located extremely downtown, as you can see if you look at this map of the area (warning, very large image!). The NTNU campus, also known by its abbreviated Chinese name ShiDa(師大) is located just a couple of blocks northeast of Guting Station, which is one of the largest in the city. Since the school is located in such a downtown area I may or may not be able to afford a room within walking distance, but I’m sure that going a couple of subway stops away would not be much of a hardship at all.
So this is it, I’m about to have some dinner, pack up my stuff, and head to the airport. I would like to remind everyone that there are a number of galleries of photos from some of my previous trips, and to look out for more of both writing and photographs here regularly and hopefully soon.
Since I’m about to leave for Taiwan I thought I would finally upload some of the previous travel photosets that I had been meaning to post ever since I created the blog. Click each thumbnail for the corresponding gallery page.
Beijing, 2004
While in Beijing I of course had the visit the Great Wall.
This is a set of photos I took of the outside of an abandoned Beijing Opera house I found in a sidestreet. The decaying hand-painted posters are great, I only wish I could have somehow taken them down and saved them from the inevitable demolition.
Urumqi, 2003 and 2004
Turpan, 2004 and 2004
Almaty, Kazakhstan, 2004
