IT’S GETTING DARK and I hear my stomach making demanding noises. I’ve been walking the cobblestone streets of Nara since arriving here by train this morning and the only food my stomach has sampled today is deer cookies...
This exactly matches my experience. My late wife and I dropped into a tiny yakisoba joint. We were the only ones in there, and we sat at the bar/grill. The owner/chef had a mimeographed 'English' menu. We chose something and she cooked it up right in front of us while we 'chatted'. Her English was very limited, I had a semester of Japanese in graduate school forty years ago. It was delightful.
I'm so sorry to hear about the passing of your wife, but sounds like you've had a wonderful experience there. It's these smaller, intimate experience of casual human connection that we often truly cherish.
This sounds like a great experience! I will add it to my bucket list to try one when I go there! Wasn't on my list before.
I had a trip to Japan planned for early 2021 but, well, that didn't happen. And then it was like, I'm 36, am I gonna have kids, also, will Japan ever welcome tourists back? And now it's not going to happen for quite a while. But it still is going to happen!
My wife took 6 semesters of Japanese and has a large collection of doujinshi that she can work her way through. She's been involved in crowdsourced translations of some Japanese iPad games when the English server got taken down and there was only the Japanese one left and vpns had to be used to play. I think she'd be a decent guide for us, though she's not fluent as if she'd lived there. She has a talent though.
I really wish our society were a high-trust society more like Japan. There are pockets where it is - rarely ever in the big city outside ethnic enclaves - and it's folksier in small towns. Sometimes chatting up strangers works better than one thinks. If you have small kids you get fawning conversations about them with many older people. But it would be nice to have something more like this to feel a part of a community!
Yes, I've never had to worry in Japan. I'd drop something and strangers will chase me down to give it to me. I should set up an experiment and film it next time I'm there.
I really hope you get to go. I think you'll enjoy it and your wife speaks Japanese, so...
Yes, we will definitely go, but maybe wait until kids are like 11 and 9 so they can appreciate it and brag to friends!
I kind of want to pop over to South Korea too because I took a few semesters of Korean for fun in grad school and I think it's a very interesting country! Korean has the best and most rational alphabet in the world if you didn't know: it's an alphabet and not kanji like Japanese and Chinese. The letters are also designed to look the organ articulating it in the mouth. So syllables that start with what looks like a small circle are vowels, as you have to open your windpipe to make them. It's super cool.
Very cool! Korea is also fascinating to me in that it has the same Cold War division that Germany had. Only Korea's is far, far worse, and still ongoing. Germany was only separated for 40 years, and has now been reunited for 35 years, and the issues caused by that between those sides of the country are pretty big. Imagine the issues North and South Korea would have with each other if they united after now 75+ years of far worse and more total separation.
I also engaged with Korea quite a bit when I was very actively playing and following the pro scene of Starcraft 2, a game I got to a pretty high level in. I watched every single GSL pro league match broadcast from Korea, with the English casters. (All the best players are by far Korean.). A lot of lore about being a foreigner living in Korea came up listening to those esports casts.
Also interested in Korean history and the current geopolitics of the area. I am continuously surprised how South Koreans still seem to direct most of their anger not at North Korea, not at China, not at Russia, but rather at Japan. In Kim's Convenience this comes up a lot, the Korean shopowner saying "In 1910, Japan invade Korea!!" and trying to have every Toyota that parks in front of his shop towed. It seems like unique folly that their anger is directed so heavily at the Japanese when the North Koreans are the ones who are the big threat. There's even a ton of anti-American sentiment on the left in South Korea, which makes absolutely no sense to me as we provide all their security (at least for now...) and they would have no nuclear deterrent against the North without us. And what with how we prevented them completely from being conquered with the Incheon landing in the Korean War. It's wild if you study the Korean War closely and see just how insanely close the North came to taking the whole peninsula until the Americans (and some Canadians and Australians too, actually) landed and saved them, though they of course continued to do the heaviest fighting and most dying.
This exactly matches my experience. My late wife and I dropped into a tiny yakisoba joint. We were the only ones in there, and we sat at the bar/grill. The owner/chef had a mimeographed 'English' menu. We chose something and she cooked it up right in front of us while we 'chatted'. Her English was very limited, I had a semester of Japanese in graduate school forty years ago. It was delightful.
I'm so sorry to hear about the passing of your wife, but sounds like you've had a wonderful experience there. It's these smaller, intimate experience of casual human connection that we often truly cherish.
This sounds like a great experience! I will add it to my bucket list to try one when I go there! Wasn't on my list before.
I had a trip to Japan planned for early 2021 but, well, that didn't happen. And then it was like, I'm 36, am I gonna have kids, also, will Japan ever welcome tourists back? And now it's not going to happen for quite a while. But it still is going to happen!
My wife took 6 semesters of Japanese and has a large collection of doujinshi that she can work her way through. She's been involved in crowdsourced translations of some Japanese iPad games when the English server got taken down and there was only the Japanese one left and vpns had to be used to play. I think she'd be a decent guide for us, though she's not fluent as if she'd lived there. She has a talent though.
I really wish our society were a high-trust society more like Japan. There are pockets where it is - rarely ever in the big city outside ethnic enclaves - and it's folksier in small towns. Sometimes chatting up strangers works better than one thinks. If you have small kids you get fawning conversations about them with many older people. But it would be nice to have something more like this to feel a part of a community!
Yes, I've never had to worry in Japan. I'd drop something and strangers will chase me down to give it to me. I should set up an experiment and film it next time I'm there.
I really hope you get to go. I think you'll enjoy it and your wife speaks Japanese, so...
Yes, we will definitely go, but maybe wait until kids are like 11 and 9 so they can appreciate it and brag to friends!
I kind of want to pop over to South Korea too because I took a few semesters of Korean for fun in grad school and I think it's a very interesting country! Korean has the best and most rational alphabet in the world if you didn't know: it's an alphabet and not kanji like Japanese and Chinese. The letters are also designed to look the organ articulating it in the mouth. So syllables that start with what looks like a small circle are vowels, as you have to open your windpipe to make them. It's super cool.
Wow, I didn't know that about South Korea. Been wanting to go there also!
Very cool! Korea is also fascinating to me in that it has the same Cold War division that Germany had. Only Korea's is far, far worse, and still ongoing. Germany was only separated for 40 years, and has now been reunited for 35 years, and the issues caused by that between those sides of the country are pretty big. Imagine the issues North and South Korea would have with each other if they united after now 75+ years of far worse and more total separation.
I also engaged with Korea quite a bit when I was very actively playing and following the pro scene of Starcraft 2, a game I got to a pretty high level in. I watched every single GSL pro league match broadcast from Korea, with the English casters. (All the best players are by far Korean.). A lot of lore about being a foreigner living in Korea came up listening to those esports casts.
Also interested in Korean history and the current geopolitics of the area. I am continuously surprised how South Koreans still seem to direct most of their anger not at North Korea, not at China, not at Russia, but rather at Japan. In Kim's Convenience this comes up a lot, the Korean shopowner saying "In 1910, Japan invade Korea!!" and trying to have every Toyota that parks in front of his shop towed. It seems like unique folly that their anger is directed so heavily at the Japanese when the North Koreans are the ones who are the big threat. There's even a ton of anti-American sentiment on the left in South Korea, which makes absolutely no sense to me as we provide all their security (at least for now...) and they would have no nuclear deterrent against the North without us. And what with how we prevented them completely from being conquered with the Incheon landing in the Korean War. It's wild if you study the Korean War closely and see just how insanely close the North came to taking the whole peninsula until the Americans (and some Canadians and Australians too, actually) landed and saved them, though they of course continued to do the heaviest fighting and most dying.
Reminds me of my many past business trips to Japan... where I never had a bad day or a bad meal!
It's really such a wonderful place to explore. I hope I get to go back soon.