Just a quick post to let everyone know I’m still alive. It’s been too long since I last posted, so an update is in order. My winter semester started, I’m taking a six credit Japanese course which comes out to three hours of class a day, plus about the same in homework. So I’ve been pretty busy, and I’ve got a few plans coming up. Beginning of February I’m going to Sopporo for the snow festival, and at the end of this month I’ll be going on a snowboarding trip. Anyway, below is the introduction to the second part of my winter vacation report, which I’ve been working on for awhile now. The rest will be up soon, but here’s this for now.

Travelling in Japan is an easy, if somewhat irritating, process. I suppose it’s probably more typical than it seems, as a lot of countries have efficient, well-maintained public transportation that can get you almost anywhere in the country. Coming from the US though, a country so large that any given point A and point B are likely to have multiple climates and time zones between them, public transportation like this is something of a wonder. I can, from any given city, town, or abandoned shack in Japan, walk into a train station, buy a ticket, and be on my way to any other city, town, or shack. I only really have two problems with this system. First, it seems that the system has been designed under the assumption that people need anywhere between 30 minutes and two hours to wander around the train station when changing trains, which happens often. The JR railway is really just a sequence of local trains, so none of them go all that far. What this means is that if you need to travel any significant distance, say from Tokyo to Akita, then you are likely going to have to change trains a minimum of eight times, assuming everything goes well. This might not be a problem if connecting trains left with any sense of urgency, but that’s not the case. As such, if you are travelling in Japan, you can assume that a good third of your travel time will be spent sitting in train stations waiting for the next train. This might not actually be unusual, but my only frame of reference for train travel was when I was in Europe, where you have roughly 30 seconds to get off a train, sprint across the station, and catch your connecting train. It’s not really a big issue, but it is an inconvenience. My second problem with the rail system in Japan is the delays, of which there are a lot. In my experience, for every two hours you are scheduled to be on a train (or in a train station) you can expect to add another hour of travel due to some sort of delay. This happened to me on my return to Akita, and as I had been on and off trains for the better part of twelve hours by the time the delays started, I was somewhat aggravated. It might have been different had I been able to understand what the people had been saying over the intercom, but as it was I had no idea what the problem was. It’s hard enough to understand what is being said over those things when I speak the language, so trying to figure it out in Japanese is next to impossible.

Seagulls that fly over the bay

Registration was today, and I decided to take the simple route and just take Japanese for the winter semester. It’s a six credit course that meets for two or three hours a day four days a week, so it will probably be a lot of work, but seeing as how they are trying to cram so much material into an eight week course I can’t say that I blame them. Hopefully it will be a good opportunity for me to get a good handle on this language and move up to intermediate level Japanese in the spring. I may be being overly optimistic, but we’ll see. In any case, class starts next week, so I’m trying to get myself mentally prepared for it.
I did end up doing some travelling, though my original plans didn’t work out and I was only gone for five days. My roommate and I were going to head up to Hokkaido, which is the Northern island of Japan. The capital city is Sapporo, a large city famous for its beer and ramen. Needless to say it sounds like a place that’s worth visiting, but the only way to get there is by plane, which is expensive, or by ferry, which is less expensive, but by the time we tried to get tickets they were booked through the New Years day. I found this out after I met up with him in Sendai, which is the largest city in the Tohoku region (the northern most provinces of Honshu, the main island). I had originally planned to go with my roommate on the 27th, but I had to pay a bill by the 28th, and they weren’t open on Sunday so I had to wait a day and meet up with him the day after. I had some issues figuring out the travel, so I ended up taking the Shinansen, the bullet train, to Sendai from Akita, which was nice. The trip was about six hours shorter than it would have been otherwise, so I got to see more of Sendai than I would have otherwise. Sendai is a nice city, sort of like Minneapolis on a larger scale, urban without feeling too crowded. There’s a main street that goes through the retail district and makes something of a circle around midtown, and you can find a wide variety of just about anything there, though it all is about twice what you would feel like paying for it. We were only in Sendai for that night, so we spent a while wandering around town, just trying to see what was there. After we figured out that we wouldn’t be able to get to Sapporo we decided to head south, and see what was interesting along the way.
The day after I got to Sendai we got up at six and caught a train to Matsushima, which is really a beautiful place, if a little touristy. The area is considered one of Japan’s three greatest sights, because of the bay which holds something in the area of 200 islands. Each island is small, and made of what looks like sandstone, or some other soft rock. They jut out of the water anywhere from 10 to 50 feet, and are sculpted by wind and waves to look smooth and twisted. All of these islands have pines on them, and they range in size from something three people would have a hard time standing on to large islands with buildings on them. We took an hour long ferry ride that goes around the bay, and it really is something. I wish I had pictures of it but, as is often the case, I forgot my camera. I remembered everything else, battery charger, spare memory card, but the camera got left behind. It was fine for awhile, because my roommate was taking pictures, but he lost his camera, so we have no pictures of the trip other than what was taken on our cell phones, which is not much. I’d like to think of it as a learning experience, but history has shown that there are certain mistakes I don’t learn from.
After the ferry ride, we wandered around the area for awhile, and visited a couple museum/shrines, which was fun, but as with anything like that, it all started to run together by the afternoon. Fortunately, we stopped for lunch before I got too bored with it. We were looking for a place to eat close to the bay, which might have been a bad idea since that are is really tourist oriented. There were a bunch of restaurants all in a row, and outside each one was an old woman trying to convince us, loudly, to come visit their restaurant. It was somewhat embarrassing, as they all address you as “Onee-sama” which translates to something like “Respected older brother,” but which in this case is just a method of sucking up. The food was okay, though it was too expensive and there wasn’t enough of it. After we ate we explored the town for a couple more hours, and crossed a bridge to check out one of the larger islands. We stayed in Matsushima until about four, when it started getting dark, at which point we caught a train heading south. I can’t remember the name of the city we got off at, but it was about four hours worth of trains to get there, and I think it started with an M. Mido maybe. Anyway, we stayed there for the night while we tried to figure out what we were going to do for the rest of the trip.
Keep an eye out for part 2.