Miyuki.

The first time I met Miyuki, I was shocked at how good her english is and how open and friendly she was towards a perfect stranger.  She’s actually my friend’s language partner, but I spend more time with her than any other Japanese person I’ve met.

Despite all of this comfort and our (admittedly short) history together, it was surprisingly difficult to take her portrait.  Miyuki is amazing and cute, but she doesn’t think that she is.  This made taking pictures of her awkward, and even though we’ve become so comfortable around each other recently, the moment I picked up my camera we both just sort of froze up.

Naturally, after we started talking about it and making jokes and things like that, it became easier.  I tried to wait until she did something that she does a lot, so that it would represent her as a person in photograph form.  So for a while, it was mostly me taking ninja shots like this one to the right here, but I wasn’t satisfied with her posing at the last moment.  For a while we stopped shooting and started talking about plans for spring break among other things, and for a second while she was listening to a friend explain something in english, the photo below happened.

This photo is by far the most telling of Miyuki’s personality.  She’s kind, sweet, and very intelligent.  She’s amazingly patient with those of us that speak english when we go off on incomprehensible tangents and actively tries to make us feel part of the university.  This is one quality that I really appreciate in Miyuki because it seems to be so rare here, the fact that she’s unabashedly friendly and not shy about approaching people at all.  In this way she proves that stereotypes about Japanese people are unnecessary in most cases (though admittedly I have met many Japanese people who are reluctant to speak to me at all and thus fit the stereotype well).  It was a privilege to take Miyuki’s portrait, and it helped me with my issues with taking pictures of people here.

What I see.

So, at first glance, Hirakata seems to be very much like an average American city.  (Note the power lines, the people walking along the road, and the multi-storied apartments.)  Looking a bit closer, however, reveals some differences.  For example, the people walking by the road have no sidewalk, whereas in my hometown there are sidewalks everywhere.  It’s a small difference, until you find yourself walking down the side of a street that is honestly too small for one car, much less two, plus pedestrians, dodging every vehicle that comes your way.  It’s at this point that the difference seems a bit more noteworthy, and its hard not to miss safe walking paths.

However, these small streets and compact living quarters serve to create a very close, quaint neighborhood around Seminar Houses 1, 2, and 3, which is beautiful, and we are lucky to be able to enjoy it.  On the other hand, walking to and from school through such a stereotypical Japanese area makes it easy to overlook scenes like this one, a view from a bridge nearby.  It’s hard to picture Japan as an “industrial” landscape, but that’s certainly the adjective that comes to mind here.  It’s like smashing a big city and a small town together to see what comes out of it, because when you turn the corner from that nice old neighborhood and walk a few steps down the road, you are greeted with sparseness, tall grey buildings and lots of sky.  It’s very much like walking between two different worlds in a matter of steps, which is surprisingly mind-blowing.  I guess my point here is that to describe the area in which I live requires first the ability to understand and reconcile the stereotypes and blatant differences that make up this place.

First Impressions

So, Japan.

I felt like when I first got here it would hit me in the face like, “wow, I’m in Japan”.  Suprisingly this did not happen.  It was life as usual, just a different routine.  Japan, in many superficial ways, is just like home.  There are buses you can take, washing machines to use, desks at which to attempt homework before resorting to facebook, etc.  At the grocery store there are brands I recognize, and even through my disgraceful Japanese I can usually make my intent clear.  However, the little things are starting to make it apparent that I’m not where I’ve always been.  I can’t walk out the door without nearly being run over by a moterbike, a bicycle or, more likely, a tiny tiny car.  There is no wheat bread to be found, and when I try to ask for a certain dish at a restaurant it comes to me as something completely different 40% of the time.  When I just want to talk about nonsense with my friends, most likely my language partner, it is almost impossible because I’m not that good at Japanese and she’s not that good at english, so even my ability to express myself has changed.  These things do not make this place or this experience a bad thing, its just a very different sort of situation than I’ve been in before, and the most suprising thing about it is that I’m just now beginning to realize how very little I know about this place.