Pictures from the J-List New Year's Party, If You Want Them
Okay, since I managed to get back earlier than I thought, here are some pictures. The izakaya was a place called Hokkatei, combining the first two characters of Hokkaido with Tei, meaning stop or in this case restaurant. Good seafood, considering we're as far from the sea as you can get.
Since Forget-the-year and New Year's Parties are quite common in Japan, restaurants like this have pre-set menus ready for us. We got the sashimi and nabe set, which was lots of fish (which you really appreciate when you come to live in Japan), and three big pots of kim-chee soup. Yum.
A rare glimpse of the J-List crew. Hilariously, the girls all sit on one side, and the guys on another side, no matter what we do. It's like we're all in Elementary School. This is us about to do the clap I wrote about in today's update.
This is atsukan, hot sake. It warmed us nicely.
The nabe was delicious, too. This is kind of like sukiyaki, but deeper, and with different ingredients, including kim-chee, tofu, vegetables and meat. When we'd eaten it all, they put rice and crab meat in and stewed it some more and it was heavenly.
Later it was off to the karaoke box. They actually have disco balls in them, isn't that cool? Do they have disco balls in the U.S. at all? I've been gone way too long to know the answer to that.
There sure was a lot of anime and even video game music to choose from, testimony to the rise of otaku culture in Japan. Here you can see the full selection of songs from Air, one of the PC dating-sim games that was so popular they made a mainstream anime out of it.
I've posted before about how good karaoke is for learning Japanese. The only problem I had with it was, it's so effective at teaching you how to read and pronounce kanji properly, you outgrow it quickly.
Just what we all need, a medley of songs from Macross 7. Well, that was our fun little party. Hope you are going to have some fun this weekend, too. And of course, kotoshi mo yoroshiku onegai shimas, which essentially means thanks for your past support, and we hope you'll continue to help us out in the future.
posted by Peter in Japan at 1:40 AM
8 Comments:
Elementary school, hm? In my secondary school in central England, that was how we organised ourselves habitually, with a gender split down the middle of the classroom. (Actually it wasn't such a universal rule; I had the impression that for some reason it happened especially among the academically-inclined people.) When a chap from the North East joined our Sixth Form he thought it was very odd; I hadn't noticed we were doing it until he pointed it out.
3:39 AM
I think you'll find that at most social occasions, people of the same gender tend to cluster around each other. I don't think it's really a conscious decision, we just like to be near people whom we can relate to. (not necessarily opinion-wise)
There are still disco balls in the US, but few and far between. Most you'll probably find in a roller-skating rink while cheesy disco plays.
6:39 AM
Robert, I've always been interested in how some of the odd things I observe in Japan actually came from Britain, since Japan has looked to the UK more than to the U.S., especially pre-war. Did they used to split boys and girls up in a class, with the boys being listed first and the girls after the boys? They only just stopped splitting the kids by sex in the year my son started school, 2001 or so. Since they assign a number that the kids use all year long, it essentially means all boys are numbered "higher" than all girls.
11:06 AM
The way I remember my own school days, when the teachers actually took an interest in seating arrangements it was in the hope that a 'boy-girl-boy-girl' order would make the class less disruptive, i.e. the exact opposite of gender splitting. (I've never known that to work with a bunch of teenagers...)
My experiences of British education begin in the late '80s, though. There was a television series called That'll Teach 'Em which recreated schools of the '50s and '60s to see how modern children would react, and one thing that stood out was the segregation between subjects: 'Although this era [the 1960s] is often seen as the birthplace of sexual equality, boys and girls were often split into single sex groups for lessons: boys took woodwork and bricklaying in preparation for being 'men' and the girls took cookery, needlework and parentcraft, learning how to be a good wife and mother.'
9:19 PM
Interesting. Yes, they supposedly do that in Japan, too, split up with boys preferring technical classes and girls doing "home-ey" things. If I had a time machine to go back to the 1960s I'm sure I'd have similar culture shock about things.
10:12 AM
Peter,
thank you for posting these pictures. I did not expect to see anything on a Saturday from you. How does one eat the squid? not sure I could handle that, heh.
10:20 AM
Peter, as far as I am concerned you could never post too many pictures.
It's interesting how you say that karaoke is effective at teaching kanji. I am a student in Philadelphia learning Japanese and some karaoke from Japan might really help my friends and I learn kanji. Can you sell some karaoke items?
By the way I love your random anecdotes about Japanese life. I enjoyed the story about your student who asked for a "tish" and even more recently your story about "no media day." Your stories really spark my desire to learn more about Japan. Thanks.
11:06 AM
Squid is consumed in many ways. As sushi raw, or cleaned and cooked with sauce. It's very firm, like octopus.
Yes, Ben, Karaoke is a good way to beef up your kanji while providing positive feedback (i.e. singing a song no one expects foreigners to be able to sing). I'd suggest trying to make some Japanese friends and seeing what they can recommend in terms of music. There are some good classic songs in this book, too: http://www.jlist.com/PRODUCT/PB552 This was good for me, learning some basic songs so I could get up and sing in front of people and start having the "fun" that Japanese is all about.
As an aside, I had a nisei nihonjin teacher in high school named Ms. Kataoka, although everyone calld her Ms. K since no one could pronounce her name. She didn't know any Japanese except for the Sukiyaki Song, but one day she found me in a karaoke restaurant belting out Kanpai or some other song, and was so floored that one of her students had learned the language like that. It was pretty cool.
11:28 AM
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