あけましておめでとう [akemashite omedetou]

I know it's been a while. One of my New Year's resolutions is to post more, and catch up on the backlog of posts I've promised myself that I'd write.

But that's not why I'm posting.

Words cannot describe the New Year's I just had. But ima try.

So I made us a huge New Year's dinner of okinawasoba and tempura and we watched Fright Night until 10:30, then switched on NHK to watch a Japanese celebrity impersonator competition which included a male Lady Gaga and a Simon and Garfunkel manzai duo. Hilarity. Japanese TV is awesome. But it is unimportant to the story. Anyway!

HP brought me out to the balcony during the countdown because it was "more romantic, gawd." And as we kissed, we heard the gong of the first of the 108 bell tolls of the Buddhist temple. We strained to hear the reverberations, and then he turned to me and excitedly asked if I wanted to go find it.

We raced to get our shoes on.

We wandered via echo, jogging and stopping like meerkats to listen for the reverb against the buildings (sometimes it lies!) and winding our way through the backstreets and over canals in the absolute silence except for the giant bell.

And then we found it.

It wasn't a big temple, nor was it fancy. It was pea-green in the odd nighttime light, in fact. It had its big golden altar in the middle floor, and a spiral staircase to the top floor where, under the roof, the enormous bell was being struck by a mounted log, battering-ram style. From the street, we could see the abbott (honest-to-goodness, robes and rosary and everything abbott) and one of the monks, and HP tugged on my sleeve with this look on his face and said "let's go up and see."

I protested, but my feet said otherwise as we walked up the spiral steps and to the top, where we bowed to the monks awkwardly and when they bowed back, they waved us over and handed us the reins to the bell.

I must've looked absolutely petrified, as I protested "Is it really okay? I'm a foreigner!" in Japanese and they laughed before showing me how to do it. So the husband went first, then I did (and I could feel the vibrations in my toes and in my chest), and after dropping money in the donation box, we bowed, wished the monks あけましておめでとう, and descended the stairs...

...only to find the local shinto shrine right next door with the festival in full swing. Booths, snacks, lanterns, garlands, and tons of people. It was pretty packed, but I vowed to come back and take pictures some other time.

We wandered home holding hands, listening to the remaining tolls and talking about how absolutely fucking cool that just was, and when he mentioned that he wished I'd had my camera, I agreed at first, then corrected myself. I was glad I didn't have my camera, in the end, because I had this odd feeling that stopping to shoot would've kept me from really enjoying where I was and static pictures would've cheapened it. Maybe this post does, a little. But I needed to share how I'm feeling right now, because it's awesome.

We made it up the steps, poured some sake and grabbed some mochi, and toasted to the new year. And now we're sitting here, warm and dry and pantsless with chai and ginger tea, mellowing out and remembering how the wet pavement looked and the chilly sea air on our faces and the crowded, labyrinthine neighborhoods and the bridges over the canals and the lantern-covered shrine and the lime green temple and the abbott who welcomed the wide-eyed foreigner in flip flops and a messy cardigan to ring in the new year with him in his temple.

In a little while, I'm going to go salt the salmon filet in preparation for being broiled for breakfast tomorrow morning, which will be the first day of 2012. We'll probably visit a shrine with his family to welcome the new year at some point in the day. There will likely be a crowd, and maybe some noodle stands, and perhaps even a taiyaki vendor or two calling me over with their fish waffles like a siren song.

But it won't be nearly as epic as the adventure we just had, chasing bells in the middle of the night.

Edit: Tiny cellphone snapshot of the pea-green temple.

Haz vs Washer

Today, I translated the eight modes on my washing machine. Until now, I'd only ever used two: normal and gentle. And none of the others were in my kanji phrasebook, so I rolled up my sleeves, copied them onto a post-it, and set down with the online dictionary I use.

If I know the reading, I can use that to narrow it down. Otherwise it comes down to stroke numbers and the radicals that make up the symbol. However, one unfortunate side effect of living with a math major is that I've slowly lost the ability to count properly, leading to some confusing translations.

Japanese lesson of the day: The kanji for "dry" and the kanji for "virginal" are one stroke apart. My washing machine does not, in fact, have a "virginal" option.

It's that clean.

You're welcome. Now I need to go wash my dirty, dirty laundry.

Anecdotes from Japan: Slang for genitalia, aka Why you should always have a dictionary

So, even though the OS is in Japanese, my denki jisho (electronic dictionary) and I are inseparable. It has JtE, EtJ, Kanji lookup, and various other wonderful features that I don't understand how to use yet.

It basically looks like a DS. Mine is sans stylus.

It's good for deciphering things in a grocery store and on various storefronts, but not much use in conversation, as that moves quickly and most people (in either language) prefer mime to get their point across.

Also, though I do make it a point to talk to people when out on my own, most of my attempts at extended conversation have been with HP around, seeing as these first few days, we've been mobbed by family members. The closest are HP's youngest aunt, Kiyomi-obasan, and her husband, Yoshio-ojisan. She peppers her sentences with the few English words she knows, and Yoshio is a fairly atypical Japanese man in that he's a chatterbox. Not that I mind - it's refreshing to see someone so friendly - but both of them have encouraged my speaking Japanese, and I've been able to hold broken conversation with them on my own and even make a few terrible jokes.

Fast forward to Sunday night. We're invited out to dinner with them and their only daughter, Reika, who is my age and recently married. Her husband Yuuji was also there, and I'd been warned that Reika was uncomfortable with her American relatives, and therefore would likely be functionally mute throughout dinner. Though after introducing myself (in Japanese) and giving her the gift I'd brought over (a designer label bracelet covered in gold filigree and various charms), she seemed to warm to me a lot. Dinner was ordered, we talked about various subjects at normal Japanese pace with HP giving me rough translations when needed, though I could mostly follow along and contribute. They asked about my family, what kinds of foods I liked, and how I was liking Japan and wow was my Japanese getting better by the day! Also, what anime and manga did I like? Because everyone does.

A mysterious but great philosopher known only as The Sphinx once said: "We are weakest when we think ourselves strong." And just as I was relaxing into the flow of conversation and congratulating myself on how well everything was going, I heard a word I didn't understand.

Now, there's a phrase that almost every beginner Japanese student learns on the first day. It follows the pattern of "Xx wa nan(i) desu ka?" meaning "What is xx/What does xx mean?"

I use this phrase a lot. The Japanese are usually happy to oblige when I don't understand, and I've learned most of my daily vocabulary this way. So when HP and his uncle were talking about work and wives and pain and snickering, I asked about the word I didn't know.

"Sumimasen - 'Kintama' wa nan desu ka?"

At this point, he and his uncle started laughing, and everyone else, who'd been having another conversation, asked what was so funny. I turned to them and repeated the question, and they laughed too. Kiyomi smacked her husband a little, and HP only managed to say that they were "Ichiban no taisetsu" [the most important thing] before he and his uncle died laughing again. At this point, I sighed and grabbed my jisho out of my purse (a habit that made his family laugh without fail, and this was no exception) to look it up. Reika looked over my shoulder, saying "Arimasen!" [It won't be there!]

Except it was.

Don't bother looking it up; I'll save you the trouble. Hint: It means "balls."

Kintama - lit. "golden balls;" testicles.

Reika laughed even harder as she declared "Aru yo!" [It's there!] and everyone broke. Again.

I had (albeit unknowingly) functionally asked them "What is 'nutsack?'" and then looked it up in the dictionary.

His uncle bought me a beer and gave me a thumbs-up. I am apparently the most hilarious white person ever.

The moral of the story is always have your dictionary with you and men are the same everywhere the end.