Sunday, November 26, 2006

名古屋!

Some might say: "Where in the hell is Nagoya?" and well, they'd be right. Nagoya is Japan's fourth largest city (right after Tokyo, Yokohama, and Osaka) with around 2.2 million people. Here is a crappy map, it's between Tokyo and Kyoto. A lot of these people, as I have since confirmed through observation, are Japanese. Actually, probably most of them are Japanese. Despite this unsurprising fact, there are a LOT of foreigners here. You can pretty much rest assured that if you're near a subway station, you can probably hit a gaijin with a rock if you have a decent arm. This is because none of them have cars, and they are always out drinking.

"Gaijin," or "外人," is a slightly pejorative term for foreigner. In common usage, it means "outsider," but a lot of us refer to ourselves this way. Though I'm not exactly awesome at reading kanji, the best I can tell for these is that it comes from the symbol for "exterior" (外) plus the symbol for "person" (人). Interestingly enough, the sound "gai" is also a word by itself meaning 'harm.' It might not be too much of a stretch to make a connection with that one, but the kanji is completely different for the stand alone word (害) so hey, I dunno. Fourth largest city in a modern developed country. Visions of Tokyo! Oh the expanse of tops of heads on subway trains! The bustling night life! Well... not exactly. Nagoya is known throughout Japan as the "rural city." Hell, most people don't even think of it as a city at all compared to the fungal expanse of the more than eight million people that constitute Tokyo. Let's get one thing straight though: Nagoya is a city. It has buildings, it has a subway, people walk to get where they're going... it's a city, people. Maybe being from a small town skews my perspective a bit on this, but spades are spades!

City it is indeed; nightlife it has. Six level dance club full of buxom Brazilians and the Caucasions who love them? Check. Skyscrapers? Yes, a couple, anyway. All in all, it's not too bad a place. Though I have to say (in slight incongruence with my earlier gripes) that it so far hasn't really sported that "big city" vibe that you get from walking around New York or London. To quote a recent biopic: "each neighborhood is another world- replete with its own intricacies--"... that not so much. I will be the first to admit, though, that this might have an awful lot to do with my inability to really talk to anybody or even begin to understand those intricacies. わたしわがいぶをみりますね。I see the exteriors, you know? Add to this the fact that somebody decimated the city with bombs around the middle of the 20th century. Nagoya does not have an old feel... even it's most famous landmark has escalators. Once again, I blame my lack of simple communication skills.. a difficulty I hope to remedy through the cunning use of... bilingual Japanese friends!

Well, I'm only half kidding. Truth be told, I've finally started to make an honest effort to learn the language. It's pretty difficult, but probably not so hard as people give it credit for. That said, even one of my (Japanese) students today said: "Oh.... Japanese is very hard. I am not very good at it." Great, so what chance do I have then, buddy?

Just for good measure:



3 comments:

e r i k a said...

thank you for this animated .gif of a cat, jjjjjjjjffffff

Anonymous said...

Hey, you may wanna double check that hiragana there ;)

When saying 'wa' as a particle, ie, "watashi wa", you want to use the は hiragana. Also, did you mean みえます?

Anyway, blog is off to a good start, keep it up!

Jeff said...

ぼくはこれがわかります!ありがとございました。