The One Where Kerk Did A Phenomenal Job Documenting Japan

Every time I meet someone new in Korea, they usually ask if I speak any Korean; until recently, I always answered with a sheepish, "No...sorry." But then something happened that made me realize my vocabulary isn't so bad. After all, I know how to say yes/no, hello/goodbye, thank you and 'how much?' I can order water or beer, noodles or rice, beef or pork. Most importantly, I can ask where to find a bathroom. What made me suddenly appreciate how much Korean I speak? I went to Japan.

Whoa. Hey there, Japan.

Here's a strange thing I've learned about myself: when encountering an unknown language my brain defaults to any words I know in any language other than English. In Korea, I sometimes get the impulse to answer in my very poor Spanish. The same thing happened in Japan, I'd panic and blurt out Korean. During our first not-so-successful ordering attempt, Mans and I said in frustration, "I have no clue, I wish this menu was in Hangul!" "I know, then we could at least read it!" We looked at one another in surprise as we realized we'd wished for Hangul before we mentioned English. Did we really just express a longing to read Korean? Talk about a change in perspective!

We were able to take a trip because of Chuseok; often explained to Westerners as Korean Thanksgiving, people eat special food (albeit rice cakes, not turkey), visit with relatives and honor their ancestors. Since we had no family to visit, we headed to Osaka and couchsurfed with some English teachers who offered great advice about their city.

Yodo River in Osaka (yes, we kept calling it the Yoda). As I was taking this, a man on a bicycle wearing a hawaiian shirt stopped and said he was happy to spot us because never sees foreigners on the bridge. He introduced himself as Mark Fukuoka and then proceeded to tell us every bad English riddle he knows: "Whats the longest word English? Smiles- there's a mile between two S's. What's America's national flower? The CAR-nation."

We were standing next to this little shine and we had been wondering about it; Mark explained it was one of many small memorials around Japan for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I immediately felt guilty and I wasn't alone because in perfect unison Mans and I exclaimed, "Wow, I'm so sorry!" Mark looked genuinely confused, "Why?" he asked kindly. "You didn't do it, you were not born yet!" It was surprising how nice that was to hear.

Osaka is home to Tenjimbashisuji Sontengai (my spell-check hates me so much right now). It's the longest covered shopping street in the world and there we caught our first glimpses of Japanese arcade culture. Put yen into an a claw machine and you could go home with:

A LIVE puffer fish! Or...

...a Disney character who dropped acid and has reverted to cannibalism. Why, Minnie? Whyyyyyy?

Alternatively, put coins into a photo booth. Haven't you always wanted to be-

 in a banana? Wait, what the hell?

Or try your hand at Pachinko, a gambling game that appears to be slot machine meets pinball meets Aladdin's Castle (gambling for money is illegal so you win tokens exchangeable for goods). If you're not from a po'dunk town in the Midwest and don't know what Aladdin's Castle is, I feel really sorry for you.

Where does one park one's car at the world's largest covered shopping street? Trick question!

The bike culture in Japan is incredible, everyone's got one: grandmas, young moms (with a seat for the baby in front and one for the big sibling on back), businessmen in three piece suits. Major kudos to the Japanese for their efforts to combat global warming-- obesity too! We had a hard time adjusting to traveling on the left, but I came to understand why older Koreans can never seem to pick a side to walk on; in Korea, people drive and walk on the right, but during the Japanese occupation they had to do both on the left following Japan's laws. No wonder the elderly folk just plow straight down the middle.

The second day we took a day-trip to Nara by train. Nara was Japan's first capital way back in the day, it's full of temples, gardens, and places to nerd out over history. Fantastic.

Sika deer wander freely and are incredibly tame, as they've grown up being hand-fed by tourists.

The happy little Nara mascot, part Buddha, part sika deer.

Todai-ji Temple, the largest wooden structure in the world and houses an enormous bronze Buddha.

To give some perspective, the Buddha's ear is over 8 feet tall...

On our return we had trouble with the ticket machine and a Japanese man about our age helped us (we nicknamed him Kyo-- the middle name of my dear friend Ross). We ended up taking the train back with Kyo and he told us tons about Japanese history and the ever tempestuous Japan/Korea relations. He even said quietly, "Some of us are actually part Korean, we just don't talk about it." The same thing happens in Korea-- once during a conversation about a student I was told, "He's half Japanese, you know..." as if that might be an explanation for his poor performance in class.

Dontonbori, a hip downtown area in Osaka, for dinner. This was Japan from the movies, we walked up and down the street a number of times dazzled by neon.

As evening fell we wandered through side streets packed with bars that could seat around six people. We popped into one such place and that's when we met Shinhae and Mina...

We sat down next to them and when we proved willing to talk, they kept us there for hours. Their English was limited so we borrowed a marker from the bartender and wrote words and illustrations on napkins. Mina kept stroking my hair and whispered confidentially, "Extensions?" When we admitted that we had not yet tried takoyaki (octopus dumplings) Mina ran out, only to return minutes later with two heaping trays. She literally fed us, while holding a cupped hand under our chins indicating that we could spit them out if we didn't like it! Finally, we tried to head to the subway but Shinhae called a cab and they rode with us to direct the driver (even though they lived on the opposite side of the city). They refused to take any money and Shinhae shook our hands while Mina gave us huge hugs before they drove off.

The next day we awoke early to continue on our journey on to Kyoto. But that's a whole 'nother story.

To be continued...

If You Move To Asia

A friend of mine works with inner city youth and teaches them to use writing as an outlet for their frustrations. The following is a poem I wrote to help me laugh at the difficulties I often face in a country where I literally don't fit in sometimes.

If You Move to Asia

If you move to Asia

A hunchback you may be
Bend on down
Try not to frown
Especially when you clean



Brooms come to the knee
Sinks come to the thigh
Snore and more
On the floor
Where all your linens dry



Don't start me on the markets
Cart handles are so low
My back deflates
I'm not eight
Why did I have to grow?

Shoe shops are a nightmare

They never have my size

Not in feet

Not in mete

er, can you empathize?

Why are fish down there?
Why do grandmas stare?
They have long hair
I'm so bare
I don't fit in anywhere!


Their legs are in a pretzel
While they eat their food
Mine are long
And don't belong
Is standing up so rude?


I walk into the store,
They tell me "No large size"
I got fat
Just like that
Woe are Western thighs!



The cars here are so small
The subway seats tight-knit
I'm so pleased
I'm not obese
because I wouldn't fit



Am I five-foot seven?
Am I weighed in pounds?
Fahrenheit
Isn't right
And miles can't be found



WHY DID NO ONE WARN ME?
That I would become

a hunchedback
circus freak,
big-footed
Kpop geek,
floundering
everywhere,
too big for
underwear
too long-limbed
for the clothes
making me
a too-exposed-
DAUGHTER OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
LIVING IN A TIME-WARP ZONE


WHEN WILL I FEEL AT HOME?
(Must I buy a Samsung phone?)

I've been here almost a year
And now I'm setting free
The pressured thought
To find a lot of
Asian things to suit me

One Shot!

The title of this post is from a trip we took to the natural rock water slides in Meeryang, where the group organizer could hit the first rock in such a way that he could slide down all the subsequent rock slides in one shot. Everyone started yelling "one shot" whenever they wanted to encourage someone to slide the gauntlet:

I've posted over 500 pictures on Facebook since I've been in Korea, and that can be a little bit overwhelming when I want to look at a quick pictorial overview of my year here. So here it is, the beauty and dynamism of Korea in 50 pictures or less:

my shot!

Korea has technically outlawed corporal punishment in the schools, and my school is desperately trying to find new ways to deal with unruly students. One of the most common ways to punish them now deals with physical feats of strength, so here they are being forced to walk flat-footed while crouched down, pulling on their ears. After doing this for 10 minutes, I suppose I would also be deterred from wearing my uniform jacket inside out ever again.

Nowadays, it's common for me to walk down the hall and see a scene like this. These students were being punished for being late to class.

a traditional Korean meal

and a traditional Korean attempt to make Western food: here, Kelly is not too happy that they put her savory ham sandwich (which they call "sand" for short) on a blueberry bagel

A typical beach scene in August. Koreans REALLY hate the sun, which is why they're all hiding underneath these umbrellas

A traditional Korean/Asian dessert, "pot-bing-su" which is Chinese for 'ice red bean.' It's red beans (used in all their desserts here), ice, assorted fruit, and ice cream. I promise it's delicious!

Koreans LOVE nail design, and it's usually far more intricate than anything American women ever get.

You can buy books in vending machines in the subway!

Koreans are obsessed with beauty, so when I moved here I wasn't too worried about finding the face moisturizer that I use daily to protect my skin. The Korean words on the bottle sounded like "Hey-a-neese-euh" when I pronounced it, and it didn't sound English to me, so I figured it was some Korean word I didn't understand. All summer long I kept commenting to my friends that I had fewer freckles than usual, but I reasoned that perhaps the Korean sun wasn't as strong as Indiana sun. I really wish that someone had warned me that Korean women only use moisturizer that has whitening bleach in it, because that Hangeul on the bottle was actually trying to say "Why-te-neese-euh," or... WHITENESS.

Korean couples often wear matching T-shirts or socks to prove that they're together... but perhaps this is taking it a bit too far?

Korean rice cake. NOTHING like our rice cakes back home

Bakeries have been a recent fad here, and they go all out to compete with those countries that have several decades on them.

A traditional Korean market, where you can buy anything: beans, kimchi, hats, octopus, dried squid, high heels, lettuce, rice cakes, chopsticks, tupperware, etc.

Koreans don't like to carry around thick books, so it's normal to rip a book in half or into quarters, or tenths. My students often come to class with one unit ripped out of their textbook. So when an author like J.K.Rowling comes out with thick books that weigh several pounds, the publishing companies save the consumers the hassle of ripping apart their precious books and instead partition them ahead of time.

Here you can see the fourth book divided into four books

On this particular night, a bunch of us had gathered at a galbi buffet restaurant to bid our friend, Alexis, goodbye. At the next table over, we noticed some Korean guys having a birthday party for their friend. When they started singing "Happy Birthday" in English, we naturally joined in the chorus. They thought that was great, and so they proceeded to share their cake with us and take several pictures with us throughout the rest of the meal. After that, two men from another table came over and treated us to soju and beers. This kind of experience is not all that unnatural here =)

Dried squid, a favorite snack of Korean people, especially when accompanied by beer at a baseball game

Korean-style pizza. I think this one had popcorn shrimp, pineapple, honey mustard, soy sauce, sweet potato, coconut, and green peppers

A typical Korean shower/bathroom. There's no separate bathing area, just a toilet, a sink, a shower head and a drain. I actually prefer this kind of shower now, because I can easily clean my entire bathroom while cleaning myself!

Kimchi for Breakfast

When I was younger, one of my favorite books was entitled "Ice Cream for Breakfast." It told the story of a family who did everything backwards - they walked on the ceiling instead of the floor, they slept with their head at the foot of the bed (Pippi Longstocking style), and they ate ice cream for breakfast. I remember thinking how cool that family was and how I wanted to be different like them.

I of course had no capacity at age 7 to appreciate the social commentary that the author could have been making about defying the norms and challenging the status quo. Instead, the first time I moved out of my parents house I grabbed a bucket of ice cream from the dorm mini market and dug my spoon in it at 8am with a triumphant "Ha!" I might not have been nutritionally prepared to go to my 9am class, but I delighted in foregoing America's traditional breakfast options for my own interpretation of what breakfast could be.

Which was dumb. Outright stupid. What body would ever want its host to dump such crap in it first thing when it wakes up in the morning? And not just the day when I chose to eat ice cream, but all the days when I've forced cold carbohydrates or dairy into a digestive tract that hadn't woken up yet. I remember reading in my yoga journal last year that it's cruel to put anything cold into your body first thing in the morning, because the digestive tract hasn't warmed up yet and cold food makes it angry. Which makes perfect sense. My body does, after all, prefer a warm shower in the morning instead of a cold one.

I listened to my yoga journal for a month or so, preparing warm oatmeal in the morning as opposed to cold cereal. But one thing I couldn't get on board with was the suggestion that I should start eating vegetables for breakfast. I get it, I really do. When you first wake up in the morning, you need energy, and the best place to get that is from plants which produce their own energy.

But like almost every American I've ever known, we were raised to believe that you eat eggs, bacon, cereal, fruit, yogurt, toast and a whole bunch of other grains, fruits, dairy, and even dessert for the first meal of the day. So it was very difficult for me to force myself to ingest something green at such an early hour when I had been trained and conditioned to believe that you only eat green beans and broccoli for lunch or dinner.

Koreans, of course, think this is ridiculous (and rightfully so). They've been trained and conditioned to believe that the best way to start your day is not Folgers in a cup big enough to dunk your donut, but rather by ingesting something that on the previous day was receiving energy from the sun. So they eat greens, along with their staple of rice and kimchi. Energy + something to fill your stomach + something to aid your digestion first thing in the morning. It makes sense.

It also makes sense to eat the same types of food for all your meals. When did our culture begin thinking that we had to section off breakfast as this time of day when eat fewer or no vegetables? Why didn't the mantra "Momma always says, eat your vegetables" apply to the first meal of the day?

Kimchi sold in our market. Doesn't this look appetizing for breakfast?

I researched (and by that, I mean I wikipedia-ed) breakfast in different countries around the world, and it seems that vegetables are eaten for breakfast mainly in Asian countries, sometimes in African and Middle East countries. Other than that, people in Europe, Australia, and the Americas tend to eat meats, fruits and dairy. I wonder if this is in any way related to the rate of obesity? Or related to energy and productivity in the workplace? Koreans, after all, don't need caffeine in the morning in order to wake up. Coffee here consists of pouring a tube of instant coffee (coffee-looking crystals that have the flavor of coffee but not the caffeine, plus copious amounts of cream and sugar) into a tiny paper cup, mixing it with scalding hot water and taking it like a shot. They usually don't have this for breakfast, however, and instead drink it after their lunch or dinner as a dessert.



I wish I could say that all of this pondering has encouraged me to change my lifestyle and that I will pledge to eat kimchi for breakfast for the rest of my days, but in a year full of so many changes to my daily routine, perhaps maintaining a bit of comfort when I first wake up in the morning is okay.

Can You Relate?

Koreans put a lot of value on relationships, and I'm not just talking about the marital/lover kind. Every single relationship holds incredible importance, whether it's mother/daughter, brother/sister, storekeeper/customer, or second-eldest-brother-of-my-mother's-father/youngest-daughter-of-my-younger-brother's-daughter. And they have a special name for each of those relationships so that neither you nor the people you are talking to ever have a doubt about the relationship you have to any person you are talking about.

For example, a girl's elder brother is "oppa," but a boy's elder brother is "hyeong." Husband of a girl's elder sister is "hyeongbu," but husband of a boy's elder sister is "maehyeong." My aunt on my mother's side is "Imo," whereas my aunt on my father's side is "Gomo" (special side note about that - when you go into a restaurant and you're not sure of the status of your waitress, you revert to calling her "Imo," because everyone knows, as my Korean friend explained to me, that everyone is more fond of their mother's sister than they are of their father's sister).

Needless to say, it gets a little confusing. I just want to know one word for aunt, one word for brother, and one word for friend instead of having to remember the special name for my father's sister's youngest daughter's husband. But from the Korean perspective, they can't understand why on earth we would want to put ourselves through the elongated possessive ordering of saying "My neighbor's daughter's boyfriend's parents' dog attacked me last night."

Also, because Korean people have a special name for every kind of relationship, this means they want to know everything about you when they first meet you. It's very common for me to meet a new person, and they'll never ask me my name, but for 15 minutes they'll fire a battery of questions at me, such as "Where are you from? What is your job? Are you married? Do you have a boyfriend? Who was your first lover? How long are you staying in Korea? But no seriously, WHEN are you planning to get married?"

At first, it felt a little strange to be asked so many personal questions, especially when they were coming from my male students. But it felt even stranger to have a 30-minute conversation with someone, only to have it end abruptly once the Korean person was satisfied about how I was going to fit into their society, because I would stare at them as they walked away and silently ask "But what is your name?"

The reason why they don't feel the need to ask a person's name is because their job is considered to be more important. Thus, everyone addresses one another based on their title. When I want to call out to one of my friends at school, I say "San Sang Nim!" ("Teacher!"), or "SSAM" for short. Yes, you would think that every teacher within earshot would turn around when hearing this, but miraculously, the teacher you're aiming for seems to know when it's he or she who's being called upon.

When you go into a hospital, you address each person there as "nurse" or "doctor," and if you bump into your friend while shopping at the local market, you address her as "chubu," which means "housewife," because raising children is considered to be an honorable full-time job, so it's important to address such a woman with the respectful title.

We Westerners like to say our name immediately upon introduction, as if our name and name alone will somehow signify everything the other person needs to know about us. And maybe that was true centuries ago, when our surname related to our job, such as Blacksmith, Farmer, or Builder. But nowadays it holds no other meaning than the people we're related to, which is why the introduction can oftentimes be followed with, "Ohhhh, is your mother's sister's husband's father the owner of the bank?"

I'll end this post with what originally inspired me to write it, which was the encounter I just had with the local restaurant owner of the place where I like to buy my gimbab (any number of ingredients rolled up with rice in a dried seaweed wrap):




I've been going to this restaurant for several months now, and I always walk in and say "Chomchi gimbab hana poja, ju-sey-oh," which means "please give me one tuna gimbab to go please." I don't know why it took so many months for the Imo at this restaurant to finally have the courage to barrage me with the typical set of introductory questions. Perhaps my pronunciation has improved and she therefore thinks I might speak a little more Korean now, or perhaps she was trying to get up the nerve to ask me the questions in English but gave up. Or maybe the way I was dressed today lent an air of approachability. I don't know. But whatever the reason, she meekly handed me my gimbab then in rapid succession hit me with "Are you Russian? Oh, teacher? Where? How old are you? Are you married? No, do you want to marry a Korean man?" When I finished explaining the origin of my particular type of species, she seemed much more relaxed and confident and then smiled at me as she put extra radishes in my bag and said, "Service-ee for beautiful woman."

I had no idea that I had been stressing this poor old lady out by not offering up this vital information about myself from the very first time I stepped foot into her restaurant, but I'm glad she had the courage to approach me today. Hopefully she'll no longer look terrified every time I stop by, and with any luck I'll continue to score free radishes based on my looks. I just wish I knew her name.