We’re finally making the move this weekend, though we’ve been sending boxes in loads every weekend so it feels like it’s been going on for almost a month now. Today we called to set up internet service at the new apartment, and had some trouble.

Japan is a pretty high-tech country, and in recent surveys it’s been shown to be leaps and bounds ahead of the US in internet connectivity (of course when you have half the population of the US crammed into an island the size of California, with only 18% habitable land area, it makes it easier to connect everyone). Bandwidth costs here are also pennies to the dollar compared with the US — the last time I purchased internet service was almost 3 years ago, and I ended up paying $60 a month for speeds 120 times faster than what people in the US were paying $150 a month for. So I admit that even I fell into the false assumption that people in Japan should know what they’re talking about when it comes to net service.

We had a very long conversation on the phone about prices and setting it up and all, and eventually they asked me what OS I use. I should’ve just lied and said Windows, but I managed to say Ubuntu without thinking, and immediately regretted that mistake. The sales lady didn’t know what that was, and said that they don’t support it, and I should buy their tech support program for an extra monthly fee. I told her it was okay and I knew what I was doing, but she kept insisting that their internet service won’t work on my PC. I tried to explain that service is service, and it doesn’t matter what the PC is running, but then tried to explain that their cables won’t work with non-Windows computers and I should buy their tech support service. Later she asked me how many machines I would be setting up, and I said two, but she told me that was also impossible without their tech support service and a Windows PC. At this point there really wasn’t anything more I could explain to her… I said it was okay and I didn’t need the tech support, and she told me that they will have in investigate the building to see if they’ll be able to install the internet service or not. This will take approximately 3 weeks.

It seems that telecommunication company incompetence is a global, cross-cultural phenomenon.

Today marks the end of my 3rd year in Japan and the start of my 4th. Wow! It’s hard to believe I’m working on my 4th year now. And it’s been one year since I stopped teaching English full time and moved to Fukui city. Then again I’ll be moving back to Takefu in a couple of weeks… And this has been one year of painting nearly full time for me. And although I haven’t gotten any big breaks or major projects yet, I feel like I’ve noticeably improved as a painter. And I’ve had a little bit of success as a freelance painter, even if nothing big. Moving to Takefu next month, I hope I can improve on that. I’ll finally have a studio and a place to hold my art (rather than stacking it in a pile in the center of this tiny one-room apartment), and I’m planning to try starting up a small painting circle and teaching some lessons.

Time certainly flies, doesn’t it! 光陰矢のごとし。

Yes, it’s a little late, especially considering I just did a Tanabata post, but it would be wrong of me to go without mentioning the 4th of July.

When I was  a kid in 4th grade, my family took a trip to the UK during July. One of the big things I remember from that trip was that it was the first 4th of July I would spend outside of the US, and I feared I would be somewhat less American for doing so. But the really interesting thing was that British radio spent the whole day talking about the 4th of July and interviewing Americans about what they do on the holiday — even playing patriotic American songs. I was fascinated by the irony considering the origin of the holiday.

July 4th in Japan is nothing like that.

Seriously, the day goes by completely unnoticed, as one would expect in any country that is not the US (or perhaps Canada or the UK). And of course there’s nothing wrong with that at all. For me, though, I spent my 4th of July mostly in Kanazawa, taking the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (N2 level, which is judged to be standard business-communicative level).

You may remember I took the test back in December for the first time. Back then I didn’t have much of an expectation, and I was just doing it for fun to see if i could. I had taken a sample test of Level 3 (which is lower than 2, for those of you who don’t know) and passed it easily, so I thought 2 was the right level to try. I failed that test by a small margin, but I pretty much met my expectations — I passed the listening and grammar sections with flying colors and bombed on the kanji/reading section. This made perfect sense to me since I speak Japanese a lot but rarely ever read or write in it.

This time I thought I would be a bit more prepared. I bought a pair of kanji textbooks for N2 level and studied them front-to-back until I knew about 90% of them perfectly. So I had some confidence that I would be able to close the small gap that failed me the last time, even if some of the kanji were still too difficult for me to read.

Boy was I wrong.

Again, the listening and grammar sections were a piece of cake, but the reading/kanji sections… WTF! A good 60% of them I completely could not read, and I would say that upwards of 40% of the kanji there I had never even seen before, let alone read them (as an artist I have a very strong visual memory, so I can spot the difference between a word I simply can’t remember and a word I’ve never even seen). The first time I failed the test I didn’t feel frustrated at all, because I had no expectations and I thought I would have a lot of trouble. This time was ridiculous and I felt pretty unhappy having spent so much time studying only to have it mean absolutely nothing.

Now, I don’t know for sure that I failed. It’s possible I closed the point margin after all by some close number. However I don’t have any confidence that I passed this time. Had I simply not remembered the words I saw I might have felt foolish at my own inability, but this time I felt absolutely cheated. All of that time — and two entire textbooks — was a totally waste in regards to preparing for the test. Granted I learned a lot of good kanji, and it will help my Japanese skills… but the point was to also pass the test, and I don’t know if the Level 2 book publishers dropped the ball on selecting reasonable kanji or if the testmakers just made the test too difficult… but the only feeling worse than being unable to do something is feeling like you were deceived into being unable to do something.

After the test, and with me pretty unhappy with the huge disparity between the easiness of the listening section and the difficulty of the reading section, my wife and I drove back to Takefu to celebrate the 4th as best as we could in Japan. We bought some hamburger meat and hot dogs, and found the largest bun-like bread we could find (pitifully small butter rolls) and grilled them up on a grill totally not made for burgers. They turned out delicious by some stroke of luck, though, and we had a great dinner. Afterwards we shot off cheap fireworks and listened to the US National Anthem on Youtube. It ended up being a pretty good day despite everything.

Teeny tiny grill

Not a bad setup for a Japanese Fourth of July!

Summer has officially begun in Japan, and although you folks in the US are melting in your shoes in this heat wave, here we’ve been having fairly cool weather (continuing the trend of the unseasonably long and cold winter we had, and the very short and very cold spring). I was walking around the rice paddies tonight in the cool humid air and I saw some kids setting off fireworks. I thought about the 4th of July for a minute, and then remembered today is July 7th, or Tanabata.

Tanabata Ukiyoe

Tanabata is a star festival derived from the Chinese festival Qi Xi. In the days when Japan used the Chinese calendar, the 7th day of the 7th month generally fell in August around Obon, and so over the years this holiday has mixed a number of Chinese and native Japanese traditions together. It’s based on the legend of the Princess and the Cowherd. It tells of Princess Orihime, daughter of the Sky King, who lived on the banks of the Milky Way. She was such a skilled weaver that she was always busy with work — too busy to even fall in love. This made her very sad, and so her father arranged her to meet Hikoboshi, the cow-herder, who lived on the other side of the Milky Way (in Japanese the Milky Way is called “Heaven’s River”). They fell in love instantly and got married. However, once they were married, Princess Orihime would never weave again, and her father became so angry that he separated them across the Milky Way from each other and forbade them ever to meet. She cried and she cried, and eventually the Sky King promised her that if she worked hard weaving all year, on the 7th day of the 7th month he would allow them to meet each year. On the first Tanabata, there was no bridge across the Milky Way, so Orihime and Hikoboshi couldn’t meet. Again Orihime cried and cried, and eventually a flock of magpies came and, linking their wings together, created a bridge for her to cross and meet her lover.

Tanabata is celebrated here particularly by young (and single) people. It’s a lovers’ holiday, and people write their wishes on colored paper and hang them on bamboo trees. No doubt if you’re in Japan you’ve seen many of these trees everywhere you go — in department stores, outside of shops, at stations, schools, and so on. A lot of young people — especially young girls — wear summer kimonos called yukatas, which are light, made of cotton, and very beautiful in the summer night city lights.

Finally, if you’re an astronomy nerd like I am, you might be interested in knowing that Orihime is Vega and Hikoboshi is Altair. They’re two of the easiest stars to pick out at night. Even on a hazy night like tonight when the Milky Way isn’t visible, I can see both of them (in fact, I can see both of them, Venus, and not much else tonight thanks to the haze and the light pollution mixing). They straddle the Milky Way, and are the 5th and 12th brightest stars in the night sky, so there’s a good chance you can find them almost any night this season.

Vega and Sol

Thanks to the peculiar rotation of our planet, Vega was Earth’s northern pole star in around 12,000 BCE and will again be so in 13,727 CE. It is 25 light years from Earth, about 1/10 the age of our sun, more than twice the mass, and aging much faster than our sun (so that both stars are now middle aged). Vega rotates so quickly that it is pronouncedly bulging and rotating so rapidly that it almost tears itself apart. Vega also has a dust-belt like our own solar system’s Kuiper belt, and is thought to have at least one larger-than-Jupiter-sized planet. Vega has been important in every human culture that has ever gazed up at the stars, not just East Asian ones.

Altair and Sol

Altair is only 16.8 light years from Earth and is not quite twice as big as our own sun. Like Vega, it rotates at a ridiculously high speed — so fast that the equator is significantly dimmer than the poles and the planet has a very squashed shape. Altair is one of only a handful of stars (including our own sun) to have been directly imaged by humans, so we actually know a bit of what its surface looks like, rather than just knowing the star as a point of light. Altair has also played an important part in many human mythologies. The Altair system was even the setting for the cheesy Sci-Fi classic Forbidden planet. And in astrology (that parasitic profession that plays off human ignorance) Altair is connected with dangerous reptiles.

So go outside tonight if you haven’t already, take a look up at Orhime and Hikoboshi, and wish them luck and love!

Can you spot the star crossed lovers?