mitcho.com » train

91 Hours in Japan

mitcho — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 17:32:54 +0000

I just spent 91 hours in Japan. This is what it looked like.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Gaba, Shame On You

mitcho — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 11:03:29 +0000

Here’s a picture of an ad for Gaba, a big English conversation school in Japan, I snapped on a train recently. I felt the English sentence about Gaba’s satisfaction was extremely awkward, so I put it up on twitter to check with some other native speakers. My friends concurred. What do you think?

I personally think the sentence would be improved by removing the “the” in “the satisfaction.” Others offered “continues to rise” as possibly preferable to “continually rise.” English articles, especially the definiteness of abstract nouns, is very difficult for many non-native speakers. That being said, it’s sad for a sentence of such questionable acceptability to come from a company which, in theory, prides itself in its English ability and surely hires many native speakers. Gaba, shame on you.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Weekend in Osaka

mitcho — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 14:22:48 +0000

A few weekends ago, I went out west to visit Bailey. While I normally visit her in Kyoto, it was a three-day weekend, and we decided to explore another city near her: Osaka (大阪). If Kyoto is the historical capitol, Tokyo is the modern and imperial capitol, Osaka has traditionally been the merchant capitol of Japan. It’s known for its food, comedy, and business.

My trip began with the three-hour bullet train (新幹線 shinkansen) ride out to Osaka. I hadn’t purchased a ticket in advance, so that meant standing in a non-reserved seating car for most of the way there, the sole consolation being the great view of Mt. Fuji. Lesson learned: buy reserved tickets for holiday weekends.

大阪城

Our first stop was the Osaka castle (大阪城 ōsaka jyō). Located at the center of the city, the castle is surrounded by a moat and a pretty big park. Many of the paths are lined with cherry trees, making it a popular cherry blossom viewing venue in the spring.

The castle seen today is actually not the original but the end product of the history of its complicated history. Toyotomi Hideyoshi (豊臣秀吉) built the castle began its construction in 1583 but were stripped of its outer baileys at the end of the Toyotomi era in 1615. Since then many have tried to rebuild parts of it while it endured lightning strikes, Meiji restoration civil unrest, and World War II bombings.

Here Bailey reconnected with her inner Bailey:

道頓堀 and 文楽

We continued on to Dōtonbori (道頓堀), the flashy and touristy part of the town. Particularly famous is the crab restaurant with the huge mechanized crab sign. The main strip runs parallel to a boardwalk which offered a comfortable contrast to all the shops.

We also had たいやき (taiyaki), the fish-shaped cake with red bean paste inside. No fish were harmed in the making of our taiyaki.

Afterwards we met up with Bailey’s classmates and professor from her nō (能) and kyōgen (狂言) course to see a bunraku (文楽) performance. Buraku is a Japanese puppet theater tradition which originally began as street performances in Osaka and registered as a UNESCO Intangible Heritage of Humanity. Bunraku today is only performed regularly in Osaka and, compared to other traditional theaters such as nō or kabuki, has an uncertain future for its continued performance and teaching.

A bunraku performance consists of key scenes from a few different famous stories (or, stories that were famous 300 years ago), like a review show. The puppeteers are accompanied by the storytellers who have a distinct style of sing-speaking, much like in opera. The language they use is an older style of Japanese (think Shakespearean English, say), so the theater has supertitles. These storytellers are in turn accompanied by a handful of musicians.

Each puppet is controlled by often four different people, with only the lead puppeteer’s (who controls the head and right hand) face visible. You can obviously see all the puppeteers, but if you ignore all the people dressed in black and just look at one of the dolls, they really do move like people and express human emotions. It’s riveting. Unfortunately we weren’t able to take any pictures.

We love Ikeda and Momofuku Ando

The next morning we went up to Ikeda, a northern suburb in Osaka prefecture, in search of Momofuku.

Earlier this year Elvis Costello released the album Momofuku with The Imposters. The album features Rilo Kiley frontwoman Jenny Lewis. But this is not the Momofuku we were looking for.

We went to Ikeda for the Momofuku Ando Instant Ramen Museum. Andō Momofuku (安藤百福) was of course the inventor of instant ramen and cup ramen and founder of Nissin foods.

The museum is a beautifully designed building full of cute ramen-related displays and, on that day, dozens of elementary school groups. The display first takes you through the history of instant ramen—its discovery, marketing, evolution, and ultimate world (and space) domination. Have you ever wondered why the ramen in cup ramen cups are floating towards the top? Or why he decided to seal the packages with an aluminum foil top? Well, if you went to the museum, you would know these answers.

There was also a huge “Instant Ramen Tunnel”: a genealogical timeline of all the Nissin product lines, beginning with the original 1958 package.

The museum was also filled with the adorable instant ramen chicken character. We found a huge one on the second floor.

The highlight, however, might have been Mister Ando himself. Just look at him:

Frankly, that looks way more like an album cover than the actual Elvis Costello Momofuku album art.¹

勝尾寺

We took a train and then an expensive taxi up to Katsuō-ji (勝尾寺), a beautiful temple up on a mountain. The leaves were turning so it was the perfect time of the year to go.

Walking up the mountain, we started finding a bunch of daruma dolls—little dolls based on Bodhidharma, a prince-turned-monk important in the early history of Zen Buddhism. Legend has it that Daruma went into a dark cave to mediate for nine years and his eyes fell off. Even now in Japan, you buy daruma dolls with blank eyes, filling in one eye when you make a wish and filling in the other once the wish has come true.

It turns out the daruma dolls are a kind of symbol of the temple. Most temples have omikuji (おみくじ) fortunes that you draw and if you like the fortune² you can tie it to a string or tree in the temple. This temple sells omikuji that come in little daruma dolls, so many people will take their daruma and leave it someplace in the temple grounds for good luck.

The temple also had something else bizarre. A little background: there’s a famous pilgrimage route of 88 Buddhist temples on Shikoku island in western Japan. Well, why would you bother taking time to visit all those temples when someone can bring some of the ground from each of those temples into a central location!? This is what they did at Katsuō-ji… neither Bailey nor I are Buddhism experts, but we agreed it’s bizarre, to say the least.

Overall, though, Katsuō-ji and the mountains were beautiful. We had a great weekend.

Bailey’s take: “He’s a G.” I still have no idea what that means. ↩
or if you don’t like the fortune… I’ve heard both advice. ↩

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Linguistics in 嘉義

mitcho — Tue, 13 May 2008 15:24:32 +0000

A couple weeks ago I went to Chiayi (嘉義, pinyin: Jiāyì) to present a paper at the Linguistic Society of Taiwan’s National Conference on Linguistics.¹ I got a chance to meet some wonderful and kind Taiwanese linguists, make friends with some linguistics students, as well as explore the city of Chiayi.

Chiayi is a medium-sized city (270k people, so still way bigger that Luodong or Yilan) on the plains of southwestern Taiwan. The good news about getting to Chiayi is that there is a high speed rail station—the bad news is that that station is actually about half an hour east of the city by car. I took a taxi into the city Thursday night, but took the free shuttle service on Sunday.² As is the case with most cities on the west coast, it personally took me more time to go from Nanao to Taipei than to then take the high speed rail down to whatever city… such is life on the east coast: sans high speed rail.

The conference itself was Friday and Saturday. This particular conference was limited to speakers who were current students or recent MA or PhD graduates, so many of the talks were exploratory and less developed. They were still a lot of fun for me to see, though, especially as many of them were on Mandarin or Taiwanese, so there was a lot of data and phenomena that I’d never even considered. It was also great to see professor Luther Liu, an eminent researcher of Chinese comparatives, whom I met in 2006 at the Chicago Workshop on Chinese Linguistics, as well as many other friendly professors. I my gave my talk on Saturday and received an award for my paper.

You can see Luther Liu and I talking in this first picture below… try to find us!³

Each talk at the conference was followed by prepared constructive criticism by a “commentator” who’s a professor with similar research interests. As a corollary, while all the speakers at the conference were younger, a good number (30+) of professors from all around the island were in attendance as well. I believe this annual conference is an excellent opportunity for ling students in Taiwan to have their work known and criticized by professors outside of their own departments, and also to get to know others in their field. It fosters a sense of community among young researchers outside of their own schools—I’d love to see more such activities back in the US.⁴

On Saturday evening after the conference I went out with some MA students from Tsinghua University (國立清華大學, or simply 清大). As one was originally from Chiayi and another went to school there, I was in good hands for finding the best local food. We first hit up a stand to get some 火雞肉飯 (turkey rice) which is a Chiayi delicacy… it’s so simple yet so delicious!

Afterwards we walked around in their night market, eating some Finally, here’s a photo we took in front of the traffic circle which is a Chiayi landmark. Thanks for the good times!

Next up is the International Symposium on Chinese Languages and Linguistics (IsCLL) that I’ll be attending (but not presenting at) in a couple weeks, so I look forward to seeing some of my new linguist friends there again!

“The Verbal Nature of Mandarin Comparative bi”. Check out the paper or the handout. ↩
Every twenty minutes, from the back of Chiayi train station. ↩
Thanks to Claudia for most of the photos here! ↩
Chicago had a similar program, in the form of the “professionalism seminar” (which I took with Anastasia Giannakidou) and related “Graduate Student Mini-conference,” and I’m sure other schools in the US have similar opportunities for their MA and PhD students. The environment is different, however, as the field of formal linguistics is even smaller than in the US, so in some ways that community-building across programs is both more important and also easier to accomplish. ↩

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Co-schooling in Dongshan

mitcho — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 15:21:40 +0000

The Fulbright program sets up an extra “co-school” to work at for a small period of time in the spring, as a means of giving us ETA’s increased variety and different school experiences, as well as letting us touch more students’ lives. For the month of March, I will be at Dongshan Elementary in Dongshan (冬山).

Teaching at Dongshan every day involves taking the train every day, and I’m fully psyched about that. I was first quite worried as there are, according to the online trip planner, only three trains a day that go directly from Nan’ao to Dongshan but this has turned out to be false. It still does mean at least an hour a day on trains, but I’ve got my iPod with wonderful podcasts, and I’m pretty sure my class schedule lets me avoid transfers.

I’m also excited about taking the train so often as Dongshan has the newest train station in Yilan county. It’s a beautiful new modern design of tasteful glass and steel.¹

The school itself is much larger than what I’ve been used to, with five classes per grade of about 30 students each… therefore about 700 students total. A special characteristic of the school is kites… the school has a kite museum and students make kites and fly them. The English classroom closet was also filled with kites.

On the teaching front, I’ll be teaching grades 2, 3, 4, and 6. I’ll be teaching all of those classes once a week, focusing on storytelling. Today I told Jump, Frog, Jump! to second graders. I’ve never had the chance to really use the same lesson plan over and over, and I already can see that I’ll be able to learn a lot through the iterative process.

The older Dongshan station’s charm involved night-time tube lights on the fence which spelled out 冬山… I assumed the new station would mean an end to the quaint tube lights, but I now see a single string strung across the metal ribs… ↩

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

新年快樂! Chinese New Year with Andy

mitcho — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 11:05:33 +0000

It’s been two weeks now since Chinese New Year—I suppose it’s about time to write up the final adventures of my New Year break. My friend Andy from college who is Taiwanese-American came back to Taiwan to celebrate the New Year and invited me to tag along.

Day 1: New Year’s Eve

The adventure began now three Wednesdays ago, when I took the high speed rail down to Kaohsiung (高雄). Andy showed me around the city a little bit (including the nearby temple with the European-looking knight) and we had the traditional New Year’s Eve dinner, which is one of the most important parts of the New Year. We all stayed up watching TV (and the adults playing Mahjong), then Andy and I then set off some fire crackers at midnight.

Day 2: Exploring Kaohsiung

The next morning I was greeted with more fire crackers and a delicious soup with Nian gao (年糕), a type of mochi, very reminiscent of the traditional Japanese New Year’s お雑煮.

We went out with the family to the park surrounding the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts. The park features many different public sculptures.

There was also a number of pieces as part of their current exhibit on “container art,” which was pretty cool.

Many people were out in the park on this holiday, and there were many kites in the sky as well. It was a beautiful day. We then walked around through a super busy street market and went home.

Andy and I walked around at night, checking out the night market out behind his grandmother’s house, and near the neighborhood temple. A lot of great things were for sale, like various dried fruts and candies, bootleg DVD’s, and Spongebob Squarepants New Year’s decorations. I had a great time in Kaohsiung and enjoyed meeting Andy’s family.

Day 3: Taichung

On Day 3 we took the high speed rail up to Taipei, where Andy’s other grandmother lives, but stopped in Taichung on the way. Not really knowing what to do in Taichung, we decided to check out the National Museum of Natural Science—in retrospect, a fabulous choice. It was an easy free shuttle away from the high speed rail station.

Andy mentioned that he’d been there when he was very small, and only remembers that he was really scared by the animatronic dinosaurs. Most of the exhibits were in Chinese only, but we both had a fabulous time. We spent the entire day there, from about 10–4, yet only covered half the museum. A highly recommended visit in Taichung.

For some reason, though, there was a flying pig in the evolution exhibit…

And here are a couple photos from the streets of Taichung. Andy pointed out that the “Price Impossible” store actually looked emptied out, making the prices actually impossible.

Day 4: Wulai

The next day in Taipei, we decided to go to Wulai, a more rural township of Taipei county, which is home to another tribe of Atayals. The whole area is quite touristy, but the land was absolutely beautiful, even in the rain. I would love to go back again on a nice spring day.

Taking the old “Wulai wood cart” up along the side of the river, you get to one of the main attractions, the Wulai waterfall.

We then walked around up in the surrounding mountains and the Waterfall Park (we didn’t find the waterfall ). We had lunch, including some bamboo-steamed rice, and visited the Wulai Atayal Museum which, unfortunately, did not allow photography. It was a small but very nice museum, covering the lifestyle and traditions of the Atayal all across Taiwan, with some nice fun interactive features as well. I thanked the workers in Atayal, “mhuway su,” when I left, and they complemented me on my pronunciation. ^^

At night, we went out to see CJ7 (長江七號), the new Stephen Chow movie, which was a very touching, cute kids’ movie. I highly recommend it. Apple has the trailer up, so it’s probably coming to the US, and not dubbed! It’s kind of weird to have a kids movie not dubbed, though.

Day 5: Going home

The next morning we went briefly to the 228 Memorial Park and National Taiwan Museum before I left to come back to Nanao. My train ride coming home was almost three hours, and it just felt stupid, now that I know that you can go all the way down the island by high speed rail in an hour and a half. Meh.

All in all, I had a fabulous long weekend and got a good Chinese New Year experience. Thanks Andy and family for your hospitality!

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.