Although there are tons of things that I love about Japan so far, the friendliness of the Japanese students at Kansai Gaidai is one the best. If you sit still for too long, you are almost guaranteed to have a student approach you to practice their Japanese or make a new friend. One girl that I met was absolutely the sweetest thing; she stood in front of me with her friends and didn’t seem to speak or understand a lot of English, but she stared at me with wide, eager eyes like I had put stars in the sky while they talked to me. And of course, after conversation, your new friends are always eager to take a selfie with you and exchange LINE contact information.
I’ve gotten used to having my weekends filled up with fun events, but now even my weekdays are packed with lunch meetings with Japanese friends. They always bring their lunch in boxes called bento, but I haven’t figured out how to do that yet so I have to buy from the cafeteria. We sit outside or in a classroom and chat, and recently I’ve discovered that talking about Osaka-ben, or the Kansai accent, is a great conversation starter. Because I’m not fluent in the language, it’s odd to think that the people I’ve been hanging out with speak with an accent. They have a lot of fun telling me words and phrases in the Kansai accent, and I love to hear the differences in the dialects.
As far as events go, I’ve certainly been busy. I walked around the Osaka Kaiyukan Aquarium and saw whale sharks (going to an aquarium was the only real thing I had planned on doing before coming to Japan), and then climbed a mountain (Fushimi Inari Shrine) the next morning. It was exhausting, but Fushimi Inari is supposedly the most famous shrine in Japan – and I’m not surprised. It was beautiful.
The next weekend, we had an event called “Night Walk” where foreign students band together with Japanese students and walk to a mystery location at night, where they sleep over. It turned out that we were bused over to a shrine on another mountain, so I climbed two mountains in two weeks. We performed the purification rites at this shrine (fill the ladle with water, pour it over your hands, drink it from your hands, then pour the rest over the handle), prayed at the shrine (throw money in, bow twice deeply, clap your hand twice, and bow again), and then waited to begin the next phase of the event.
When night fell, our team set out to find our way back to the “mystery” location based on maps that we obtained at checkpoints set up by other students. As it turned out, we were just wandering around Hirakata for several hours until we finally made our way back to campus, where we would be sleeping in the gym. We ate dinner, learned a traditional dance, and then set up our futons and went to sleep.
Of course we were up bright and early in the morning to finish the event, and I set out to a doujinshi festival in Osaka. Doujinshi are products made by amateurs, such as manga (comics), CDs, etc. I bought tons of art from the artists and felt inspired, as I want to create works of my own, too. Fandom culture in Japan was lovely to observe, too; a booth with two girls working together received a gift from a fan as I stood there looking through their art, and this isn’t uncommon practice. In fact, there is a popular theater called Takarazuka where all roles are played exclusively by women in romantic plays, and their fanbase is full of women who fawn after the male role-player top star. They wait in line for hours just to give her gifts and love letters, and some fan clubs are professionally recognized by Takarazuka so that the presidents of the clubs sometimes drive the top stars around. There is an element of trust, pure love, and respect between fan and idol that we certainly don’t have back in America, and I love seeing it.
I’m even busier, but I’m having a lot of fun. I can see the leaves are turning red and, because scenery is one of my favorite things, I’m starting to ask people where to go to see the beautiful leaves. The weather is also starting to become cooler and more tolerable, which makes the daily walks much more enjoyable. Japan is a lovely place, and I already feel at home.
