The recorder incident

On Wednesday (17th) I, and various other international students, were subjected to a 'welcome party', hosted by the Faculty of Education. Having gone to another department's party on Monday (15th) I thought I knew what I was in for, light conversation, mingling, meeting new people in a relaxed enviornment with food and drink. What I, and none of my fellow brethren, were prepared for was an oddly formal event lasting more than two hours in which we were obliged to partake in origami, caligraphy and trying on, and then removing yukata infront of everyone present (I was thankfully spared from this). Up until the half-way point in the gathering I was in a fairly good mood, not overly happy, as I couldn't eat any of the food available and was begining to feel the pangs of starvation within my gut, but overall I wasn't complaining, the caligraphy was pleasant enough, the origami was fun, seeing my fellow german and french colleagues embarrassing themselves was midly entertaining.

This was soon to change, however, as three women (two young university students and an older lady) walked to the front of the makeshift stage area with a recorder in each hand. I turned to my friend and saw the same panic I was feeling reflected in his eyes, we turned back as the trio began to play a classic Japanese children's song, beloved by all those gathered, which no doubt made the fact that both me and my friend, as well as several other international students couldn't stop laughing throughout the entire song, incredibly insulting. The song transitioned from just being played on the recorders to being sung by the trio as well which didn't help hilarity levels at all. After they had finished, we tried to make an escape but we had apparently misunderstood a social queue as everybody gathered into small circles to play a game, which left a frankly disturbing impression upon each of us, as each person made a loose fist with one hand and placed it in the centre of the circle while one person placed their finger into each persons 'finger hole' in time to the recorder music until the designated 'fingerer' landed on a final person (as dictated by the music). After asking what happened in the end I recieved clarification that the final person was "just the loser" and that "there's no deeper meaning" to the game. At this point me and my companion took our leave, red faced and shaking with laughter, we felt tremendously bad as, to the Japanese students and teachers present, we were probably terribly offensive to their nice childhood games and songs but years of being traumatised from childhood in the UK education system with recorder lessons was too deeply engrained for us to respectfully restrain ourselves and smile pleasantly.

 Two victims of the forced yukata dressing.

Beautiful ladies!

At the weekend (20th&21st) I went down to Tokyo to see one of my favourite bands (神聖かまってちゃん) with my friend and it was fantastic! After the concert we stayed up until 3:30 doing karaoke which was splendid, as always. The next day, we met up with two more friends and had some delicious lunch in Tokyo station (they even had some gluten-free noodles for me!). After lunch, we did three hours of karaoke which was just as fun at the previous night's.

Outside the concert venue!

Shinseikamattchan's 10 anniversary's shrine thing + a screenshot of a professional photo from the concert on the singer's instagram.

"Tokyo teleport", a weird stop on the metro.

My special gluten-free noodles!

Friends!!

The last three weeks!

I hope everyone reading this has been having as much stress/hunger/fun as I've been having these last three weeks. I arrived in Japan on the 26th September at about 8am, joined the very short queue (only one other person) for people with residency, dragged my very heavy suitcases (23kg and 17kg) down to the train station, got an express train to Shinjuku and prayed I wouldn't have to walked too far through the ridiculously large expanse of Shinjuku station. Luckily, the bus terminal was very close to where my platform's exit was, I took a bus to Kofu, drifting in and out of conciousness.

When I arrived I was so relieved that I had gotten to the right place I had a little rest outside for about 45 minutes before I realised that I was supposed to be meeting someone from the university. I made my way to information office, asked them to charge my (dead) phone a little bit so that I could get the phone number of the person who was supposed to collect me and it turned out he hadn't left the university yet but would be there soon. Eventually he came and collected me, took me to the dormitory where I was bombared with paperwork and reciepts, shown to my room and allowed 10 minutes to rest before I was taken to the university to meet the student they'd assigned to be my buddy and (of course) to introduce myself to the entire international student department.

After many sleep deprived, broken introductions later I was escorted back to my dorm and was finally allowed to sleep... until I woke up at 2am. Luckily my sleep schedule sorted itself out fairly quickly, unlike my body temperature which was clearly not expecting to be assulted with 30 degree blazing sunshine in late September/early October or to be greeted with two typhoons (and a very small earthquake). This week it has fortunately cooled down enough to sleep comfortably without the assistance of the aircon. Up until now I've played some zombie games, gone to karaoke, and been very hungry. Here's some photos to summarise!

The view from my room (on a cloudy day)

Some sensible storage bands.

"A taste that makes sense comes from a production process that makes sense."

Some tiny socks for chairs!

English marketing at its finest.

A view from Kofu castle.

A tiny motorbike an old man was riding (normal man standing slightly in front for scale)

My favourite section of the library.

"Government approved textbooks"

A packet of eggs with a piece of paper inside with the best before date as well as individual stickers on each egg with the same date on them.