Welcome to Week 2 on my adventure! This past week has been about as crazy as the last, but my mind and body have had the chance to acclimate to my new lifestyle. However, before I get into the details of my activities, I’ll give a rundown on the PII curriculum and program, as I have experienced thus far. Also, I created a little video of the past 48 hours, which was more for my own experimentation, but I’ll post it for you all to watch!
PII Curriculum
As I mentioned in the last post, I placed into PII’s level 2.5. There are three levels: 2, 2.5, and 3. There are 46 total students (nine in L2.5), and as far as I can tell, most are from Princeton (at least 10, but probably a bit more). I have heard that up until this year, Harvard had just about as many or more students than Princeton at PII, but for unknown reasons, there are no Harvard undergrads this year. There are four Yalies, including me, and two are in level 2.5, the others in level 2. After speaking to the Yalies in 2.5 and former Light Fellow/PII student Martin Lim, anyone who has taken L1/L2 Japanese at Yale should be placed into level 2.5.
It is too late for the level 2 students to switch into 2.5, but even the past two weeks of class have been mostly review for level 2.5. Level 2 will have a couple more weeks of review, which is quite a waste (for those who have taken L1/L2 at Yale) in my opinion. In 2.5, for the past two weeks, we have done one chapter/day of the Nakama 2 textbook (all in all, chapters 4-11). Every two days or so, we have a kanji quiz (~40 kanji/quiz) and a big test every Monday. This sounds like a lot, but it is nothing to be worried about, and it is a good challenge. As I try to tell anyone that worries about college workload, you may at first get discouraged by how difficult something looks/sounds, but if you try it anyway, you’ll find that you can grow and learn more than you thought possible. On a side note, I don’t get discouraged very often because I don’t research that sort of stuff…which means I find out that programs like PII are “intensive” when it’s too late to change my mind.
In addition to daily classwork/homework, we have started a speech project that will be completed sometime around mid-July and a community project that we are currently working on. For the community project, I am the leader of my group of three, and we have decided to work with Kanazawa University students to help them practice English. There are Japanese tables almost every week, where KU students help PII students practice Japanese, so my group wanted to reciprocate with an English table. We did our first trial already, and we got great feedback from KU students. I look forward to these opportunities, and I will hopefully make some Japanese friends along the way!
Activities and other things
The day after (or rather same day because I wrote my blog so late) my last blog post, my host mother drove me about an hour to a beautiful mountain village called Gokayama. With about 69 residents, the Gokayama village is very traditional architecturally, but I found some very cool uses of technology…like the public bathroom (surprise haha!) and strategically placed lighting/irrigation systems. The houses have yane (roofs) that are made of neso (twisted hazel boughs). They are very steep (~60 degrees of slope) because it snows so much, and the houses are gassho-style (gassho is prayer…so imagine how your hands could look like a steep roof when you pray), which I found quite interesting because I was familiar with that term from Buddhist Temple back in America.
The pictures above are from Gokayama. I am holding an umbrella next to my host mother, Miki-san.
I loved Gokayama, besides the fact that I got extremely car sick for the very first time, because I started to feel trapped by the city once again. Back at Yale, I also got city-trapped, and it followed me here too. I found some peace there…a little bit of zen. That takes me to another experience this past week: the D.T. Suzuki museum. Suzuki was known most notably for spreading zen and Buddhism to America and The West. Unfortunately, despite being designed by a notable architect, I found the museum underwhelming and not-so-zen, but the history of Mr. Suzuki was fascinating. Perhaps, the museum building, modern-grey and minimal, missed the point of zen (I dare say that), as the air was full of cold, restless energy. I could go on about engineering zen, but I don’t want to keep playing with that idea here…
I like the trees, but couldn't feel the zen at the D.T. Suzuki museum.
Also this past week, I met up with a friend and former Berkeley Fro-CO (basically like an RA at Yale but 1,000,000x better), Martin Lim. Because he had already done PII, he took me and another PII Yalie, Dylan, to a small curry shop and guided us around Kanazawa. I had the best miso ramen dinner with Martin again the next night, and he told me about a really cool trip to take in Japan. I’ll leave it at that because I’ve decided to go over my mid-break, so it’s a cliff hanger for now.
Delicious Miso Ramen!
Finally, the last two days were quite fun! If you watch the video below, you’ll get a taste of my first time just walking around Kanazawa to explore with friends. We stumbled across a beautiful shrine/temple, a determined feline, and and arcade. I also went to a classical concert earlier today, and just like death metal, I truly appreciate the talent it takes to play at that level…but it was also funny to watch 15% of the audience sleeping. I, however, was intrigued by hearing Mozart’s most famous works being played, just as they have since nearly the founding of America…I’m sorry music friends 😉
My last adventure this week was a trip to my first Onsen (bath house). If you don’t know, clothes are prohibited in an Onsen. Despite that fact, I found it easy to relax in the various pools of steaming water, and I even got right into the cold bath, but my host brother, Taiga-san, refused that one. I think that America could use a more open culture, as I feel that a great deal of private space is expected between individuals in America, which has all sorts of cultural and political implications. I think that most Americans would be disgusted or embarrassed if they walked into a room full of nude people of all ages. Maybe Americans have all of these “body sensitive” feelings because we don’t ever see each other naked as strangers. There’s also an element of vulnerability in nudity, and I think the Onsen summarize Japanese culture perfectly in that way. I truly admire how the Japanese have created such a cohesive culture—trusting, caring, and thoughtful—especially as I come from a country that has a cultural/political rift growing wider every day.
(Poorly edited) VIDEO!
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1wVSlVdf-vT75lgNGByrbhLsdC6QdQVUW