OH YES! OH SUMMER VACATION YES!

Summer vacation has fully kicked in and I’m off for the entirity of August.  That also means I’m going to be bouncing around all of Japan for the next month, away from my computer (for the most part).  My parents and brother arrive tomorrow, my friend (Jonathan) Roig is coming a week after them, and two weeks after him my girlfriend Stacy will be here.  So expect very little, if any, posts between now and September.

FIREWORKS!

Revisiting Lake Tanuki

I completely forgot to that I took a little bit of video during my Lake Tanuki camping trip.  Without building anymore anticipation, here it is.

Pizza in Japan

The other day I got a pizza delivery menu through my mailbox, watch the video to see some details:

You can check out the menu online, in English, here.

Pizza is not nearly as common as it is back home here in Japan, but it’s by not a huge rarity, just expensive.  I see Pizza-La delivery scooters out on the roads every once in a while, and there are even smaller independent pizzerias around town.  You can even get single slices at my grocery store for around $3, but aren’t so great since they’ve been sitting out all day.  But they are just as ridiculous as the ones on the Pizza-La menu.

Lake Tanuki Camping Trip

Yesterday, Monday July 19th, was Marine Day (Umi No Hi) here in Japan and because of this there was no work!  Which is always great.  To take advantage of this, I went on a quick camping trip to Lake Tanuki with my Fuji ALT friends, Ryan and Tim.

Tim, Ryan and I head north to Lake Tanuki.

Lake Tanuki is less than an hours drive north of Fuji City in the Fuji-Hakone-Izu National Park and one of a lot of lakes in the area with great views of Mt. Fuji.  I’m told that Lake Tanuki is most popular for having great reflections of Mt. Fuji, making for amazing photos.  But since its the summer, Mt. Fuji stayed behind the clouds for the most part.

We arrived just as night was falling and immediately set up camp and got a quick BBQ in.  After that we decided to go exploring the pitch black camp site and make friends.  We pretty quickly befriended a family also enjoying the long day weekend.

The next morning I was awaken by the rising sun, but not so pleasantly because the sun apparently rises at 4:30 AM in Japan.  Since I was up, I decided to take a stroll around the lake in the daylight, since I didn’t get a good look at it the night before.

Lake Tanukie at sunrise

Japan's version of Smokey the Bear is angry and hilarious looking.

Early rising Japanese photographers hoping to get a good shot of Mt. Fuji...I don't think they actually got one.

A hotel on the lake.

While on my walk, I said good morning to an older Japanese couple, “Ohai-o gozaimasu”, and the husband asked where I was from in English.  He had fairly good English and we had a nice quick conversation.  Apparently he lived in Charlotte, North Carolina for a year a few decades ago.  Little encounters like that seem to happen to me frequently when I travel in Japan, and even occasionally here in Fuji.

That's our campsite on the left, great location.

By the time I got back to camp about two hours later, the sun had properly risen and this view came over our camp site.

Mt. Fuji as seen from our campsite.

When I first arrived I was even able to see light reflecting off the radar system at the peak of the mountain.  While its not the iconic snow-capped version of Mt. Fuji that’s on the postcards, its still an okay mountain to look at.

On our way back to Fuji we stopped at Shiraito Falls.  An amazing waterfall a short drive from Tanuki whose water almost completely surrounds you, it was pretty spectacular.

Shiraito Falls

Definitely a great camping trip and there are definitely more planned in the future.

How I get to work

The following video is a lot like my usual commute to work, except that a third of the time it’s raining.

This one is a little more straightforward

I would like the record to show that I did not pay any of my students to write this, they just think I’m that amazing.

Who’s teaching 4th period again?

In every single classroom in junior high there’s a small blackboard right next to the door that has that class’ schedule for the day broken down by period.  Often it’s a mix between subject, teacher and lesson.

Today I came to my 4th period class to see this on that blackboard.

Next to the 4 is the Kanji for “English” and next to that it says “JonJonJonJon”.  Needless to say, we all shared a good laugh over it.

Summer Weather in Japan

The entire of the month of June and the beginning of July is considered the rainy season here in Japan.  It rains at least two or three days out of the week, but when it rains it doesn’t just go hard for about 3 hours then stop, most of the time it rains for the entire day, and often through to the next day.  Luckily though, it’s rarely a heavy rain, medium strength compared to what I’m used to in Miami.  But a lot of the time when it isn’t raining the skies are completely gray, as seen in the above photo I took last week.  And because of decreased visibility, I haven’t seen Mt. Fuji in weeks.

The official climbing season for Mt. Fuji actually began this month, and ends on the last day of August, so I can’t imagine all the people reaching the summit lately have been getting very good views.

Also, because of this wonderful rainy season, it makes doing laundry a huge pain.  As I’ve mentioned before dryers are extremely uncommon here, and because of the unpredictable weather I can’t leave clothes out to dry while I’m at work (any time I think it’s going to be sunny and try it out I come home in the rain to soaked clothes) and there’s only a small window for me to get them hung out to dry while the sun is still out.  It’s actually astounding that a country that prides itself on perfecting anything it can that they are terrible at laundry.

The Japanese ABCs: Kanji, Hiragana and Katakana

My cousin Katie in New York left me a comment the other day asking me if I could post the Japanese alphabet, and I’d be happy to.  I’ll give a little bit of explanation first.

Everyday use of the Japanese written language contains three different types of characters: Kanji, Hiragana and Katakana.

Kanji are the intricate characters that a lot of people associate with Asia (especially China) where an individual character can represent an entire word or idea.  Japanese Kanji originally came from China about 2,000 years ago when Japan had no actual writing system.  Over time a lot of the characters’ meaning changed as well their pronunciation.  Even in Japan, each Kanji still typically has multiple meanings and pronunciations.  There are currently between 2,000 and 3,000 Kanji characters in use in Japan.  In elementary school Japanese schoolchildren learn 1,006 Kanji characters.  Throughout junior high school and high school they learn an additional 1,945 characters.

The japanese Kanji meaning "book", "writing" and "calligraphy"

Hiragana is where there start to be some similarities between the Japanese writing system and many Western writing systems.  There are roughly 45 distinct characters in Hiragana, each representing a syllable.  Some characters can also be combined to make slightly different sounds, similar to “th” and “ch” in English.  Because of this its actually called a “syllabary” instead of an alphabet where various characters combine to make syllables.  Hiragana is used to spell out Japanese words that there is no Kaji for, and also for beginners and young children that haven’t yet learned all of the Kanji characters.  Hiragana has a very distinct curvy shape, and when it was first introduced mostly became popular with women because of this.

A table of the basic Hiragana characters.

Katakana is very similar to Hiragana in that it too is a syllabary, but looks very different.  It’s much more angular with hard edges and is easy to tell apart from Hiragana.  It actually has almost the same amount of characters that represent the same sounds.  The main purpose of Katakana is for use with words of foreign origin.  For example, the Japanese word for “basketball” is “basuketto-boru” and would be written using Katakana.  Conversely, the Japanese word for “barbershop” is “tokoya” and would usually be written using Kanji.

A table of basic Katakana characters.

You probably noticed that there is really only one consonant syllable that isn’t followed by a vowel, which makes a lot of the words of English origin sound really weird (see “basuketto-boru”).  Also, a lot less sounds are possible with the Japanese language, there’s no “th” and no proper L sound, which makes teaching words that contain them pretty hard.  Also, because of this my official Japanese name is actually “Jonasan Kurama.”

This post was probably too long, but I was hoping to be as informative as posible, hopefully that was interesting for you Katie.

If anyone else has any questions, requests or suggestions feel free to leave them in the comments or e-mail me at kramersemail@gmail.com

All information sourced from Wikipedia and tables from Japanorama.

To the North Mt. Fuji, to the South…this

Scenic ocean view in Fuji

Homeless people, litter, grey sand beaches, oddly shaped bushes scattered about, concrete jacks occupying most of the shoreline meant to impede possible tsunamis and a thirty foot tall sea wall at your back with the same purpose.

Even in Miami, I haven’t lived this close to the ocean, but I’m sure you can see why I have no plans on coming back to this “beach” any time soon.  However, you can drive on the beach like all the cool kids over in Daytona, only here it’s because no one is around and the few (homeless) that are, really don’t care.