Kanji and the people who choose it

I completely forgot, in my mad rush to update my blog. My friends Kimura-san and Fujiwara-san gave me the best gift ever--a name. They helped me choose kanji for my name. There is no "je" in Japanese, so I used "ji" instead. So... here we are:

慈志香

Cool, huh?

お久しぶり

Righto. So it's been quite a while since I got to my blog. A lot's been happening since I last wrote a bit about my trip to the Great Wilds of Cambodia.

I'm going to school online, at the University of Arizona. I want to be a librarian, so I'm taking classes at the snail-like pace of 1 class a semester. If I hit it hard, I'll be done next August. Yay for me.

My time in Japan is almost up. In some ways I'm sad, as i'll be leaving my dojo teammates. But, in other ways, I can't wait to get out of the school. It's driving me absolutely crazy, I know. I think that, ever so slowly, I'm starting to let the lackadasical approach to learning English get to me, and even the thought of going to the school irritates me. I wanted to get another job in Japan, but I don't know that I could handle doing it. I'm ready to be around real people, I think.

So I've been working on my grad. school. Hmmm... what else. Oh yeah, I passed my 2-dan exam for kendo in January, and my 1-kyu exam for Iaido. Yay for me :0)
I'll take the 1-dan for Iaido on the 29th.

Which kinda screwed up my vacation plans. See, I thought that I was going to perhaps get to go to the UK for a job interview. Didn't work out. So now I'm scrambling, trying to find a ticket out of Japan for Golden Week. I've gotten to Tokyo and back, but I can't get any further than Tokyo right now. I really want to go to the Philippines. So right now I'm trying to actually get a cheap ticket to route through Hong Kong, and then go. Believe it or not, it's cheaper to do it that way than to fly direct. I got onto lastminute.co.hk, and I can get a round-tripper for HKD800. That's like $100 round trip US. It's a hella mess.

I took the Foreign Service Exam last weekend. After studying for only 2 months and relying on common sense, I'm altogether confident I didn't pass like I thought I would... but no big deal. So it goes, to quote one of my favorite authors --Kurt Vonnegut.

So with all my studying I kinda stopped bloging. So sorry.

Just read James Clavell's Shogun. Quite the story. Captivating enough that I picked up the continuation, Gaijin, in Fukuoka. Also bought a great new cookbook for Japanese food. Has the Japanese and English together. It's called... 英語で日本料理をつくる, or something like that. I forget what exactly. I tried their miso soup and ginger pork recipes. Very nice.

So, plans for the last 3 months? Other than trying not to go completely insane at work, I've decided to do some travel. I'm going to Okinawa in June, and will try to travel in July. I'm trying (still) to find another job overseas. I'd like to work in either the UK, Singapore, or Hong kong. I'm thinking about applying for a work permit for New Zealand. I've wanted to go, so why not work while I'm there.

They're out campaigning. It's been a constant barrage of Japango since about 9.00. Some of us *were* trying to sleep...

More on Cambodia...

After seeing the horrors of Phnom Penh, I jumped on a bus and traveled 6 hours up to Siem Reap, home to a little place called Angkor Wat. In case you wonder how much the ticket was, I paid a whopping USD$3.50.

You might think that it really sucked going on the bus for 6+ hours, but it wasn't so bad. We stopped every couple of hours for a break, and I enjoyed seeing the countryside. Traveling throughout Asia has been an amazing experience for me. My idea of cleanliness has definitely changed, as my need for an excessive amount of material possessions. I've seen people with very little, yet in some ways they seem happier and more content with life than I find myself at times.

But enough of the philosophy. Back to Cambodia. On we go, to the countryside...

It was really cool to see the countryside. In rural Cambodia, a lot of people live in simple huts which sit above the ground. There are a lot of rice farmers, kind of like Japan. The difference, though, is that Cambodian people do a lot of work by hand or with animals. Um... they eat spiders. Yeppo, spiders. We stopped at a roadside stand for a refreshment break, and I walked over to buy some pineapple. While standing at the table paying for my pineapple, I noticed the creatures in the bowl below. Was I freaked out? Not yet. When the woman picked one up and dangled it toward me, laughing...that was The Freaked Out Moment.



I was absolutely astounded to see some of the living conditions, though. See, there are a lot of poor people, and then a whole lot more landmine victims. I don't remember where I read the statistic, but it's estimated that one out of every 235 people is a landmine victim. Everywhere you went, except for in Phnom Penh, there were people who were blind, or missing an arm, or a leg. Or an arm and a leg. Or two arms. Or both legs...

So to live in the tropics, yet be poor and have no arms nor a job, nor any possibility of finding work because manual labor usually requires one to have arms...

The Winter Tale Part 2

The Winter Tale, incidently, is what Sapporo called their limited edition winter ale. Funny, I thought Kirin's was better. Sadly enough, though, when I returned from break you couldn't get it in the store anymore.

So after Bangkok I caught an early morning flight to Phnom Penh, which is known for its role during the Pol Pot regime--the KR emptied the capital city of all the people.

Yeah, you're supposed to have a visa for Cambodia, but you can buy them at the airport. You're also supposed to have a picture, but if you don't they fine you USD$1. Hello, apparantly these guys don't get out much. It's cheaper to give them a dollar than to bring a picture... I hope it doesn't get out so the system gets ruined for others.

So PP was quite a lovely city, a lot of French influence. I met up with two other backpackers and we sort of traveled together for a while. We hired bikes and went out to Choeung Ek, site of a large execution camp or "killing field". It's full-on there, as you're walking around near mass graves and on top of clothing fragments and bones. There's a couple places where you can actually see part of a person. They built a stupa (large monument) that's building-high with glass. Inside the stupa are skulls sorted by age, gender, etc. A guide actually picked up some of the skulls and could tell us how the person died--bullet, axe to the head, etc. He said that there were at least 8,000 skulls in the stupa, which was quite large.

--This is a photo of the walkway at Choeung Ek. If you look carefully, you'll see that the white pieces are bone fragments.--

We then visited Tuol Sleng museum. Tuol Sleng was a high school that the Pol Pot regime converted into a prison known as S-21. There are rooms and rooms of pictures, as each prisoner was photographed--either before or after being tortured. Just before the prison was liberated in 1979, 14 final prisoners were tortured to death, and you can see the rooms--complete with post mortum photos--where this occurred. Well, 'see' is rather polite. In fact, visitors can walk into any room and touch any thing they please (why you'd want to do this is beyond me) at the museum. Also very full-on.

From left to right: Pol Pot's "Ten Commandments", so to speak; one of the torture rooms (the picture on the wall on the left is the last victim); prisoner photo shots.

Blog Title: Origins Revealed

So you probably wonder where the title of my blog comes from. Welp, on a random whim I downloaded a Dwight Yoakam album off the Internet, and one of his hit songs is called "A Thousand Miles From Nowhere".

I'm a thousand miles from nowhere,
Time doesn't matter to me,
I'm a thousand miles from nowhere,
And there's noplace I'd rather be.

Seemed like a good idea at the time anyway.

第一ポスト

(drum roll...)

Right, so I've decided to join the rest of the world by experimenting with bloging. It seemed like kind of fun, and an easy way to let people see what exactly it is I do here in The Grand Inaka of Japan.

I'm supposed to be studying for my 日本語能力試験--that's the Japanese Language Proficiency Test for those of you following along at home--but it seems that I can't be bothered at the moment. In a rather insane moment 10 months ago, after learning that I had passed the 3rd level, I decided to give the second level a shot. Mistake? Dunno yet. But I did start studying this summer when I was supposed to be in the office. Hell, for me, summer is the most enjoyable time for this job. You show up between 8.30 and 9, go home for an hour lunch (which became an hour and a half or even 2 hours sometimes), leave about 2.30 or 3... and you can do whatever you want. And for that I received a whole lot of money... :0)

But anyhoo, back to the JLPT. So the jump is pretty high between 3 and 2kyu. See here.

3rd level to 2nd level
kanji 300 to 1000 or so
vocabulary 1500 words to 6000 or so
grammar basic conver. to beginning business level

Yeppo. So I've been trying as hard as I can (as you can see I'm doing now, while I'm writing this), but I dunno... the test is on Sunday in Beppu so we'll see how it goes.