lunarmote

[lunarmote]

An observation, I said out loud. Friends who meet in Uni drift apart.

By their own doing, my acquaintance finished for me. We were at a coffee shop in 2018. The autumn air was chilly, an omen to the mass pandemonium that would arise next year. But that afternoon seemed to give us all the time in the world to get a little philosophical.

If you want to up with someone, she continued. There's always something that you could be doing that you aren't. If only you dedicated 10 minutes to calling them. If only you thought a little bit harder about their birthday. If you were dedicated to making things happen you would. Most people just don't put in the effort.

As a child who never lived in the same city for more than a year, I knew this kind of pain intimately, the fatalistic pain of forgetting and being forgotten. It's a pain which unlocks the magical ability to jump out of the present and always to the total timeline of patterns which you can never affect. When every scene starts and ends the same, and coalesces into a mass of half-touched milestones, you wonder what lesson there is to be had.

Painful, but worthwhile

Within 10 mins I knew I would love this film.

The opening had an air of tragedy, despite the foolhardy innocence of the boys and their juvenile sexual posturing. I think my own experiences spoiled me. I'd seen too many scenes like this to not know where it would go.

And when things go south and are executed so sensitively by the Cuarón, you can't help admire them.

Things stood out to me:

The question of inevitability. Was it all going to end one day anyway? Did it take an unexpected roadtrip to release that tension toward each other? Was it inevitable that this release prevent them from ever being friends again?

When Tenoch and Julio's bitter feelings are finally unearthed, the friendship unravels with a destructive, unstoppable force. The things they choose to reveal seem to come from the foulest parts of themselves. They did not seem spontaneous. They attack each other with a sort of ferocity that can only be seen as each boy's lack of ability to understand and regulate his own feelings. It seemed that they were each hoping for something more, but there was no scaffolding in place, no inkling of what that could even look like.

And Luisa, the grown woman on the trip with them. I could see nothing positive of her intentions at first. I saw her as an opportunist whose personal tragedy got in the way of rightful action. But having replayed clips of this movie close to 20 times now, including the culminating fight in the car, I believe there she possesses a kind of spiritual knowledge and intuition for closeness, and tried to bring the best out of the boys.

Such an evocative and thoughtful film. So hard to forget.

#film review #movie review #alfonso cuaron #cuaron #y tu mamá también #y tu mama tambien #diego luna #gael garcia bernal

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A drawing of Yasaka Shrine in Gion.

#japan #artists on tumblr #gion #kyoto #japanese architecture #yasaka shrine #shrine #japanese culture #art #digital illustration

[lunarmote]

Week 10: Ups and downs

This week I: worked on a bunch of schoolwork (studying for midterms, lit reviews, presentation), weeded out some emotional stuff, went to Osaka!

There are definitely differences in mood in between weeks; this week I am feeling a surge of positive, prosocial emotion.

I started hanging out with a different group of people - sometimes someone looks really good with you on paper but you turn out to not totally vibe, and that’s okay.

Ambiguity and feeling unsafe

I will not go too deep into it now, but an interpersonal thing happened a couple of weeks ago that left me rattled.. and I was thinking back to this thing and why it made me feel so unsafe to venture out, and it has to do with ambiguity, and being connected to people in ambiguous situations.

I’ve been trying to unconsciously combat it with purposefully living.

I’m happy with my group of acquaintances and friends here. Things have been more set in stone, and not only things but certain patterns of activities. As a person I really crave stability (ok, I require stability, though parts of me look for quick dopaminergic rushes, and that’s kind of what was going wrong in the first few weeks, me being lead by the first tangent I saw, worrying that if I didn’t take this chance or that chance I would not experience Kyoto “fully”)

Looked back at discord server a while ago, all these new names I couldn’t put faces to, feeling so overwhelmed and scared. There was nothing to worry about all along, but I had to go through the process of getting worried and finding out it was no big deal.

Things that make me feel safe(r)

1. Doing fun new things, but not necessarily “risky” things (things that leave me feeling vulnerable and unsettled). Things I would do back at home with friends anyway. There are just things that make me feel bad... Bar-hopping is not fun to me, speed-dating is not fun to me, even ditching classes and tempting fate to see what one can stumbleupon is not fun to me. Just because I’m challenging myself to do new things doesn’t mean I have to do exactly the opposite of the kind of things I like. I come into this trip with prior knowledge of myself.

Here are things that ARE fun to me: finding an iconic dish and wanting to recreate it here with limited ingredients: going on a day-trip trying to find said ingredients.

Going on a day trip trying to find an exotic musical instrument.

Trying out gross ice cream flavors or fire ramen with friends.

Meeting an acquaintance at a random cafe neither of us have been to.

Walking around. 

2. Doing things that feel authentic to me. These have NOTHING to do with Japan and they shouldn’t. Things like painting for me, staying grounded and connected with music, playing old pixel horror games (IB! Crooked man!)

3. Doing school. 

There’s a part of me that takes pride in taking thing seriously, taking learning seriously and I am no longer going to stamp that part out.

Short entry this week...

#personal #travel diary #japanese street #japan

[lunarmote]

Week 9? I’ve lost track: It’s getting difficult.

This week, I: scouted out a new cafe on a high school friend’s recommendation, with new friends, hung out with dormmates, went to a Thai restaurant with friends, panicked over Japanese class, went to Gion, and experienced a typhoon warning.

This is going to be a scattered entry; I can feel it x___x

I had a very worthwhile conversation with two new friends here, in Cafe Bibliotic Hello. I think a lot about how our stay is halfway over and we don’t really have that much time left; and it’s true we can choose to make the most out of the moment, but the ultimate question is how?? How quickly time passes by and how unflinchingly. In the end, the amount of minutes in an hour is constant.

By thinking evaluatively we are placing ourselves in the future. We baby our present (”past”) selves by coaxing them to do something that future us will remember fondly. What even is that? The second you start thinking this way, everything and anything becomes pointless. 

This cafe had so many plants on the inside. The menu was handwritten, with a few laminated, half-sized drawings of individual tarts. It is often the case here in Japan that you will not be allowed to order dessert unless you order an entrée as well, or a beverage. A bit problematic for me going to cafes as someone who can’t drink caffeine and doesn’t want to ingest a sugar bomb. The lunch sets were relatively expensive; alas, you pay for ambience here, not just sustenance. 

Many items on the menu have katakana names, including the word for “hot” beverage:  ホット.

What was I going on about? While I was sitting in the cafe with friends I started zoning out a little bit just thinking about what I was doing here. It’s quite laughable that before I came here I had these grand plans to be circumspect and scribble down every minute detail of my life here, and when I’m here for real, so many of my moments blur together and I barely have the energy to do anything. My priorities are completely shifted. Not even in the sense that I have 898,735 things to do and keep putting them off. More in the sense of feeling like everything on my to-do list is pointless.

To take a random example: I was inspired by photobashers in the early days of deviantART who would release stock packs. They had an eye for eccentric textures, taking pictures of bad graffiti and stucco and dilapidated buildings, and making beautiful art out of these. I had told myself if I ever moved to a foreign country to start taking pictures of everything.

I think I did that for about a week here and then I forgot. Now I’m so familiar with the way to school and the traffic lights and the narrowness of the streets that I have lost my “curator’s” eye. I feel like you could get used to anything astonishingly fast. I don’t even remember what the San Diegan counterpart of these things look like, but I’m sure 2 weeks back in San Diego will have me forget Kyoto.

Am I satisfied with how I’ve spent my time here? If anything, I am disappointed by could improve at living for me. Even here I am driven by my desire to make things right, for other people to be happy. I need to ask myself if doing things for other people is truly who I am, or if I’m doing things to get a reaction out of them.

On Tues evening I went to a Thai restaurant with two friends from my dorm. It’s interesting to me how “spice” scales never really tell you anything because different parts of the world have different standards for spice. Taking into account that this was a Thai restaurant in Japan, which is not really known for its spicy food. But I love Thai food so much especially papaya salad, which we ordered, along with seasoned squid, basil chicken, and Tom Yum-flavored fries.

In the middle of the week I realized we had a test and I started panicking over it. I typically (at home) have a hard time studying for things anyway, but being in Kyoto doesn’t help when you are surrounded by people always doing things and inviting you to things. I tried to combat this by staying in the lounge area where people coming out of their rooms could see me. It worked, kind of.

There are a few other habits that are slipping, such as doing laundry on time, getting healthy groceries, even paying bills at the 7-Eleven. It’s always because there is one minor step that is an inconvenience and that makes me forget/put it off until it officially becomes “late.” Like, laundry for instance. Our laundry machines only take 100 yen coins, and 100 yen coins are a bit high in demand when you consider their many uses. Thankfully there is a vending machine next to our dorm which takes 1000 bills, but then I’m stuck with a sugared drink I don’t want and an extra plastic bottle I have to recycle, which then I have to buy more trash bags for. I think I collected over 20 plastic bottles before I realized this was a little bit unsustainable and I should probably start saving 100 yen coins.

Groceries I think I unconsciously started dreading when I first moved here because the cashier would say a bunch of Japanese to me that I didn’t understand. Now I understand what they’re asking and an additional problem has popped up: it’s awkward to cook here. We have a single induction stove in our rooms, no vent fan and no closet door so odors stick to your clothes, plus the length of our stays is awkward (4-6 months) and buying cooking utensils may not be a good investment, plus it’s cheaper to buy onigiri at 7-Eleven anyway, but, but-! This is not the type of reasoning you want to stick with for long. You start slipping a little and then more, and eventually, you lose all your healthy habits.

Anyway, I was panicking over Japanese class for two to three days. Why? You see, there are some people in my class with prior knowledge (I confess that I am one of them, but it takes longer for me to retain information than most people anyway) and the teacher takes them as the benchmark for speed. Lessons are too short for the amount of material we’re supposed to memorize. I say I want a study buddy but I don’t really, because I can’t study with people - the only good being in company does me is keeps me from going on instagram/reddit. Not to mention the felt futility of studying grammar in class when you are in the country surrounded by people who speak the language.

Aah, I’ve been talking about random things for so long. Here’s some more: 

This morning we received a typhoon warning for the Kansai region: landslides in northern Sakyo-ku as well as the flooding Kamogawa river. I have to say, as someone who lives in mild California, I have always found extreme weather conditions fascinating. I was a bit in awe when I stepped out of the classroom today and saw the relentless downpour - the drops melted together like a heavy blanket. 

A couple of days ago I went to Gion with a new friend. I’ve always wanted to see it for myself and, despite living 20 mins on foot from it and having known about it for so long, never got the chance to... The sun was setting in the most beautiful way, casting its light over Yasaka shrine.

#personal #japan diary #japan #kyoto #gion #travel diary

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Week 8: Birthdays, talks, and healing relationally while abroad

The following I wrote a while ago, on Week 7/8. Only publishing it now.

I had a bunch of heavier experiences this week. A few talks with people and an interesting experience of celebrating other people’s birthdays while abroad, and lots of personal insight.

Birthdays! (お誕生日おめでとう)

The first thing that comes to mind is being on a Transpacific flight where the flight attendant found out that it was a gentleman’s birthday and popped open a champagne bottle and we all sleepily but happy for the distraction, slurred a “Happy Birthday” to him.

I think of these little experiences sometimes that make up the mosaic of how I’m able to contribute to present experiences. This was the case this week when two acquaintances here had their birthdays

We never really celebrated my birthday growing up so I never really understood the significance of them, and I always thought they were supposed to be this spectacular event. To have been in Kyoto among new acquaintances must have been a different way of celebrating. We sang happy birthday, went to the arcade to play a drumming game, and hid behind corners to sing happy birthday over and over again.

These are piecemeal elements of celebration, but they’re not worse because they are different. They are simply different and exciting in a new way.

Difficult talks...

This confusing mélange of feelings, of craving connection with other people but being terrified of it!

I find myself easily misunderstood and misunderstanding other people in relational cases. My hot-and-coldness sends mixed signals to people, and it comes out as me criticizing other people, unconsciously signaling to them that I do not like them or do not wish to be in their company, when it is the one thing I crave the most.

I am still so afraid to tell people I like them, and that I admire them, and that I will take out time out of my day to be there for them, and that even if we misunderstand each other given enough elasticity and patience and willingness to growth we will be there for each other and everything will be ok! (I want to use the word love because I think it’s the most fitting but I am so terrified of that word! I’m terrified of the unfair connotations associated with it, it bears a weight I cannot carry)

I am terrified because the child inside me is wounded, and anticipates that someone will SLAP me to the ground for wearing my heart on my sleeve, for daring to dream of connection, because for so much of my life it’s been drilled into me that independence and academic perfection are the only thing I should pursue and everything is a vanity and frivolity. 

Talking to my best friend, who is so lovely and patient and tells me to not be so hard on myself while trying to reason with me, that everyone has a different experience while abroad, and there is no need to compare myself to everyone else.

It has occurred to me that we are slightly before the halfway mark and people have already formed groups. While they may still meet new people at the occasional BBQ or party, they usually won’t make an effort to go somewhere with the intention of meeting new people. For some reason this makes me a little bit sad, but I am not sure why.

Healing relationally while abroad

You cannot heal relational trauma by being by yourself and reading books on healing relational trauma. You must venture out and fall over and over again and have faith that one day you will fall less.

I’m just tired of being bruised! I’m tired of the prospect of so much more “promised” pain. I don’t want that, I just want to be among people without worry.

#travel diary #personal #kyoto #japan

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Week 6.5-7: Tokyo

The following I wrote about a week after this trip but am only submitting this now as I have a backlog of drafts:

This week I had a couple of extremely profound, changing, moving experiences.

To start with week 6.5, I met up with a close friend in Tokyo.

Tokyo - Shinjuku, Akihabara, Harajuku

What I really appreciate about her to enable our experiences together is that I never feel any kind of judgment for my weird ideas (anyway, they’re not my own - our weird ideas are pooled) - not that something is off-limits, a kind of youthful humility that we don’t know what is going on and we’re just going to go to this place and experience it, and that’s what enables us to have such fun adventures whenever we meet up, which is not often. 

We stayed at a capsule hotel in Shinjuku. On Friday night we explored the surrounding area and went to Kabukicho (the red-light district), Omoide Yokocho, and Don Quijote “Donki” the department store.

Above: Vegan gyoza!

At Omoide Yokocho we took a bunch of aesthetic photos and spent time fussing over the auto-contrast on our phones. Most of the restaurants/stalls were closing, but we got to see a couple of customers finishing up.

At Kabukicho, we saw a non-shortage of people being drunk. Some businessmen in suits, staggering wildly, clutching their briefcases in hand. Some American tourists yelling loudly at their friends to help them prop up their blackout drunk friend. A lot of tourists who weren’t drunk were whispering and we added to their whispers, taking in all the sights with bewilderment and interest. We saw an advertisement for botched plastic surgery, which was very wtf, but we couldn’t find where it was at.

A couple of guys approached us and said things we couldn’t understand. We half-stumbled, half-ran away, laughing.

On Saturday, we visited teamLab Tokyo, Vegan Ramen UZU, and Harajuku, and then Akihabara, where we spent a lot of time debating whether or not to visit a maid cafe and host club. 

What a liberating experience to be in a place where you are spared of the assurance that you understand how the world is supposed to work. Because neither of spoke the language and knew the area and were familiar with the protocol of doing things, nothing was off limits.

To be in a foreign country at night, and Tokyo at night, truly felt like time had stopped and we had the night to ourselves.

It has made me more aware that the way you experience a place really depends on the people you’re with. I have met some fascinating people here but naturally, it is not the same as being around someone you know well. There are still barriers in place with newer people. There is a certain politeness that you must meet, pleasantries you have to exchange, and you are not really sure where other people’s boundaries are.

To rephrase the last part because “boundaries,” is such a heavy word... it is not that you are necessarily prodding and testing the tolerance of other people. You don’t know what level of interaction some people are looking for, what jokes go well, what level of personal details one is willing to share. This process of discovery can be exhausting and I wasn’t really aware of how exhausting it was for me until this Tokyo trip.

I could just be myself for a couple of nights and it was a much-needed break.

#tokyo #travel diary #japan #personal

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Week 6: What are you doing in Japan?

Week 6. Maybe the title is confrontational, but I meant it as such.

I’ve been thinking about the absurdity of doing a study abroad while doing tourist activities. I have given names/descriptions to the various “lifestyles” one can adopt here, as a student with a year-long visa.

You can treat it as one long travel, foregoing the “student” part of your visa. Your weekends will consist of morning-till-evening trips, you’ve probably been on the Shinkansen 4+ times by now to Tokyo, you’ve flown to Hokkaido and Okinawa, you and your friends have booked an entire onsen in the mountains. (The biggest obstacle to this lifestyle is, of course, money)

Travel lite — you search up all the Michelin restaurants, aesthetic cafes, plush outlets, vintage thrift shops, botanical gardens, and try to squeeze them into the little gaps in your day. You probably have some “top 100 landmarks” list you want to hit or your goal is to do a power-ranking of all cat cafes by the end of your stay.

Attempted balance — You realize you’re staying long-term here and you have to study and past tests, so you establish some kind of routine (an extension of your routine back home). You focus on making close connections with the international students and maybe 1-2 clubs. You cook meals most of the time but make day trips occasionally. You are the most acquainted with the shrine 5 mins away from you but you’ve visited most of the other landmark shrines.

Attempted assimilation — I haven’t actually met anyone with this approach so my sketch will be quite fantastical but… you do all your courses in Japanese, make friends with the locals when possible, spend a lot of time at club meetings. Participate in less flashy, slow-paced, cultural activities but with the same frequency that the natives participate in them. You stay away from one-stop tourist attractions.

There is something about #1 and #2 that make me uncomfortable and I will also have something to say about #4 later. It’s only now, a month-plus in, when I’ve hit a slight dip in energy that I’m able to see #1 and #2 for what they are a bit more clearly. During the honeymoon phase everything sparkles and entices. I told my friend that the granularity of the world changed for me — that in stepping out of Kansai International Airport I suddenly became aware of every pebble on the ground and the texture of every tree trunk, because even as you do not actively take account of these things, your brain “feels” the cloak of familiarity lift. As such, whether I was going to a famous landmark or staying at home trying to count my yen coins produced similar feelings of overwhelm and positive bewilderment.

As you settle into routine, certain things that used to make you pay attention don’t anymore and you start to do things on autopilot. I’ve observed that the way classes are set up at my school is such that you almost never have to interact with Japanese natives at all. You spend your morning in the dorm with international students, your day in class with international students, hang out at a restaurant with international students, go back to the dorm or go to a bar with international students. Faculty-student interactions are in English; PANDA (the equivalent of Canvas) can be translated with a click of Google. You go to Kawaramachi and all the signs are translated into English. I have also noticed the classes I have which introduce some element of interaction between English-speakers and Japanese-speakers always cater towards the former and produces unintentional (?) pressure on Japanese students to exert themselves more as the non-default. The teacher will sometimes chuckle and say “This is how the Japanese are, so modest and unresponsive in class,” providing commentary to those who “get it,” the foreign students who are waiting for a Japanese student to raise their hand.

And of course, the beauty of a program like is is its flexibility, the opportunity for such freedom in interaction choice, travel choice. Yet… I feel like this experience has been too easy for me, as if everything were being delivered on a silver platter.

To tie this back to my earlier point, I think what bothers me is how close and so utterly far assimilation and cultural osmosis are to an international student like me. A lot of it isn’t on us, but a lot of it also is, because an experience is always in the making and pieced together every single day by the actions we take. A statement is made when our finger snaps to the “English” option on ATM machines like a magnet before attempting to make sense of any other part of the machine (which, with its bright icons and interface, can be quite intuitive), we lock on to that which has always served us. The fact that we can afford to, because some part of this world caters to people like us. I am a bit ashamed by my lack of effort sometimes and how kind [some] Japanese are when I launch into broken compensatory English because I’m weighing it to an equivalent experience back in the US. A failure to speak English in the US is usually met with some condescension or at least impatience.

I wonder as I am pacing in front of Yoshida-jinga as identically-dressed schoolchildren hop down the steps, if living among such preserved cultural monuments desensitizes them to the beauty of it, or if it enhances it because they will have had a decade and a half of a lifetime to appreciate it. How many Kyoto natives end up going to university here and among them, how many decide to choose a free afternoon (and rather than simply paying a visit to a shrine), make a “spectacle” out of it in the way that travel brochures advertise a shrine as a day trip? I do not wish to call the telephone poles here, so iconically portrayed in animes, objectively beautiful, though there seems to be no alternative to me. Perhaps the same student studying abroad in California will find our sidewalks beautiful.

But, to comment on #3 and #4 now — how is it even possible to be less trend-driven and more “authentic?” How possible can it really be to live like the locals? More importantly, why would you want to? You are not a local. I am not a local. Certain aspects of being here are [humbly] shocking. My navigation around Japanese society is wobbly at best. The internal experience is one of cultural exchange, not supplantation — we are always reconciling what we know of the world with what we are learning of the world.

On a personal note...

I feel like I am surrounded by people who always know the best restaurants, most beautiful temples, most hip music festivals, and the most picturesque mountain peaks.

I used to wonder why I couldn’t be like them too, until I [am in the process of realizing] I am not really interested in those things.

What am I not interested in? 

What am I interested in? 

Let’s start here. 🙂

I’m not much of a foodie although the idea of sharing a meal with someone is something that tugs on my heartstrings and gives me a reason to live. I don’t taste the food itself. It can be McDonalds or some dish I’ve had a hundred times. The poignancy of a meal can only be measured by the relation of the place, ambience, company, conversation to one another. So it is a little bit strange to me, that picking out all these aesthetic restaurants carries with it some element of “this is going to be great! You’re going to make an experience out of it!” when that sort of judgment can only be made by looking at the past.

As much as I plan to visit as many shrines/temples in Kyoto as possible, I’m not interested in checking off a list or visiting the “most famous” ones. That focus is wrong, to me. I need more space in between to process what I’m looking at and why I’m looking at it. I need more time to connect with the world outside myself and even if this requires me to stay at home and do some research then it’s worth it.

I’m not… hmm…

I’m not interested in doing things with other people all the time. This is future me speaking to present me. I cannot feel it right now, because of FOMO and riding the tailwind of the honeymoon phase, but it’s true. In the end, the decision to come here was entirely my own; I did not know any of these people a month and a half ago; I did not make the decision to come here knowing I would meet them and preserve these memories. We will go our separate ways in the end and I will be left to stew in what I could personally make out of these 5 months.

There are two types of things I came here with: wishes and burdens. I wished to challenge myself and to learn to be more independent. I wished to be more proactive and more others-conscious. I wished to shed expectations of perfection. I wished to take many pictures and draw many drawings. I wished to make people smile. I wished to improve at intercultural communication and Japanese.

I also carried some sadness with me. If you’ve been reading my blog you may know the kinds of things I’m talking about. I’m always hyperconscious of time passing, of how privileged I am in relation to the world, of how much miscommunication exists and how fragile human connections are. I don’t think living in a foreign country for 5 months will remove this sadness, but I am hoping for more perspective, more humility, and more strength. This stuff... requires a lot of reflexivity. A willingness to tolerate (in Dr. Alan Robarge’s words, “the acid of loneliness”) and alchemize it into solitude, the intentional, purposeful state of being with yourself.

#travel diary #study abroad #exchange student #japan #kyoto #personal

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Random observations on Japan

Maybe these are more applicable to Kyoto than the entirety of Japan, but here are some things I’ve observed:

1. Japanese people don’t say “sumimasen” often when they squeeze by you. And squeezing past people happens a lot more than in the US because of the compactness of the buses, supermarket aisles, school halls, etc. In the US, I’ll be walking on the sidewalk with headphones, and joggers or bikers coming up behind me will call out “on your right!” far before they get to me even if I’m not in their way.

Since you get off buses in the front, a lot of people will squeeze by you to scan their IC cards, and most people just... go ahead and do it without saying anything.

The exception are the staff at konbinis who say sumimasen multiple times if they accidentally cross paths with you. This makes me wonder if “sumimasen” is even the right word.

2. Escalators. Okay, so you’re supposed to stand on one side and the people in the hurry are supposed to “walk” up/down on the other side so... which side is it? Everyone stands on a different side. I’ve heard in the Kanto region they stand on the opposite side as in the Kansai region (where I am), and there are a lot of people who commute in Japan, so maybe that’s why

3. Paying for groceries.

This one is so strange to me, even though when I think about it, technically in the US we have a similar system. There is the conventional way of paying where the cashier rings up your purchases and you hand them the money directly. There is another way where the cashier rings up your purchases, but you pay through a machine, and then you take your groceries off to a table and bag them yourself (I’ve seen this at 7- eleven). And then, there’s the complete self check-out where you scan everything by yourself and pay through the machine.

4. Bagging groceries

When at konbini/supermarkets I find that cashiers rarely bag groceries for you; they’ll hand you the bag in your basket, and usher you off to an “island” where you bag everything yourself. They will usually wait idly as you’re fiddling with the card reader.

5. Japanese students in class

Here the Japanese students are supposed to take at least 2 courses in English as part of their undergrad curriculum which means there’s usually at least 2-3 Japanese students in my English-language classes but they are usually so, so quiet. I completely understand the fear of speaking up in a language you don’t understand too well, in a room full of foreigners.

Heck, I still struggle with anxiety even while my English is perfectly passable. There’s the gnawing dread of saying something potentially ignorant/stupid, and not knowing if other people will judge you.

But I have heard it’s more the fear of not speaking English well. It’s also that Japanese classes are lecture-based, and the teacher is supposed to enforce authority over the students by passing information one way down to the students. So thoughtless questions are thought to be rude because they take time away from the lecture. This makes me think that it must add an additional layer of consideration if students are encouraged to think to themselves if a question is “stupid”/thoughtless before asking.

You know how some teachers incentivize students to ask questions no matter how ignorant they may sound, in an attempt to get anyone in the class to say something? I feel like this self-filtering will not bode too well for participation...

We shall see. In 10 days, I’ll have spent a full month in Japan.

#travel diary #japan #personal

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A painting of the Heian Shrine, in Kyoto.

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#digital painting #digital illustration #artists on tumblr #art #heian shrine #kyoto #japan #japanese street #animated #animated rain #illustration

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WIP gif of my previous background :) Follow me on instagram for more frequent updates!

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#gif #art process #painting process #artists on tumblr #kyoto #Japan

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My Instagram

#artists on tumblr #digital painting #digital illustration #japan #kyoto #illustragram

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Kyoto travel log, 2 weeks in

Take a night walk with me, through Kyoto...

This is my 2-week update since arriving in Kyoto. I cannot believe it’s been 2 weeks!

I love Kyoto’s walkability

Look at this night walk and how I’m taking pictures while I’m walking (probably should be a little more cautious; I am a foreigner after all). The streetlamps provide direction; there are always people at pedestrian crossings, and in general people are just minding their own business quietly, sharing the road. I have always loved the enveloping quality of the night and long to take walks, yet I never felt comfortable doing so in California. I arrive at a fork in the road in a residential neighborhood and each way down is rows and rows of houses but I feel no anxiety or rush.

Things I’ve been struggling with

There are some things that I’ve been struggling with that I struggle to put into words... the first has to do with racism and misunderstandings.

The thing is, when you travel abroad, people view you as an ambassador of your country, while I’ve only ever viewed myself as a distinct individual who doesn’t associate strongly with any group. When I hang out with myself, I simply exist —  I am not consciously in the act of communicating things and preferences just by the way I do certain things. When you’re with new people especially those who have come from a different mode of life the differences between you become extremely obvious and perceivable.

It is a bit annoying when you insist that your nationality does not define you and others insist it does more than you think because they are not clouded by familiarity bias when they look at you.

I am also very aware of the fact that outside the Bay Area/LA/UC system where I go to school, “Asian-American” is a category that is not well-understood. I have been aware of this since the first time I traveled outside of the country and I could do a separate entry on the different ways I have been treated by Chinese people, non-Asian Americans, etc. But the thrust of it is: a lot of people still do not understand the legitimate lived experience of being both Asian and American. “But your face is Asian…” is a legitimate protest to them when you insist your values are very Westernized and you’ve been brought up reading Western Enlightenment thinkers, learning a Western conception of rights/duties/obligations, etc. (I am aware that everything I say must be broad and sweeping). And there is a mutualistic solidarity between you and the students who have grown up in the Asian country your “people” supposedly belong to, because you are both foreigners here, and your foreign awkwardness is what drives you together, but this social glue is not because you belong to a category of others who “look like” you.

FOMO and energy management as an introvert.

I’m immensely bothered by the concept of ticking time and the thought of wasted opportunities. I want to do everything at once. (As pressuring and stressful this is, it can also be a positive thing) There are very few things I would not do, only things I decide to not invest into for the time being.

It’s so hard being in a foreign country being completely surrounded by possibilities and new people. I’ve reached a point where, the beats of public transportation no longer give me an anxiety spike (can’t understand 90% of what the announcer on the bus is saying, but I know what “tsugi wa ____” means), and now it’s just the thought that I could, no should, be hanging out with this group of people, no that group of people. Genuinely positive experiences, I always feel great and fired-up after grabbing dinner and bonding with new people. But I am very bad at recognizing the signs of social burn-out until I wake up one day and feel like I really cannot leave the house anymore and need to find ways to recharge.

Another thing is, I am affected differently by different types of social interaction. I do very well at one-on-ones. There is usually more of a nurturing, positive-relating to these interactions. Then there are hangouts where you’re in a group of people exploring manga shops, talking about dirty manga/anime tropes, and these are super fun and banter-y and the well never runs dry of things to talk about, but these are tiring to me, and somehow I end up questioning the way I present myself afterward more in group settings than in individual settings.

I need some kind of reliable wind-down, something that reminds me of home. Something not energy-charged, so I can remember who I am and why I came here.

#travel diary #personal #kyoto

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Kyoto travel log, week 0

Part 2 of my arrival in Japan, where I talk about getting on the train to Kyoto Station, Kyoto Station/Tower, and my first experience being among cherry blossoms!

Read Part 1 here.

Train from Osaka Station to Kyoto Station

As an artist my eyes are trained to spot visual discrepancies at a pace that I cannot cerebrally comprehend. While I was looking out the window of the train to Kyoto Station I kept thinking the world looked so different; here was an identifiable symbol, a house, and here were a row of trees, but the “feel” of them on-scene was completely different, owing to what exactly, the architecture/arrangement of elements/compactness/colors/roofing?

I thought once about what I’d read on a digital nomad’s blog, that traveling doesn’t just teach you about another culture, it teaches you about your own culture as well. When you ponder over what makes this thing look distinctly different you have to also know what made all the other houses in your home country/street look ordinary and I didn’t know at all. I couldn’t identify any of the trees in my hometown, I didn’t know what type of tiles they used for their roofs, I knew nothing about urban planning and power lines and why the ones back home were so visually chunky.

I’ll let you see for yourself...

Mid-day shadows...

Kyoto station

These are Kyoto Station and Kyoto Tower! The lighting looks a bit dull here compared to the pics I took of Osaka but man, the sheer scale of things is so impactful when you exit and see the tower smack-dab in front of you. Due to the pandemic I hadn’t been among that many people in 3 years and it reminded me so much that we are still living in an alive, bustling world. There were people with their EOS and Canons taking pictures and other people pointing to their maps and looking lost. 

There is separate bus station with its own bus map. I got very lost reading it and had to ask someone, again. He was kind enough to type up instructions for me in my Notes app (in English!) telling me which bus routes were OK, which stop to get off at, and how long to walk :’)

The bus operates differently here. You get on through the rear doors. There is a card reader and a place to take a ticket - essentially you are logging your start and end destinations either by scanning your card twice, or taking a start ticket and paying when you get off in the front. The Kyoto city bus I took charged a flat fare for all rides so there was no ticket dispenser. 

The view from the river

When I got off at the stop to my guesthouse I was met by a swirling cloud of cherry blossom petals. It looked like something out of a movie. I’m not really one who can lose myself in my surroundings, but for a second I was stunned by the beauty and stillness of that moment.

It was pre-golden hour: the sun had gone down slightly, casting everything in an aged yellow light. I waited at the crosswalk while petals fluttered down: I reached out, as if to graze them and cushion their fall. One of them suddenly drifted upwards and I realized it was actually a white butterfly.

When was the last time I’d seen a butterfly in California?

There were stepping stones to a central platform where some college-age kids were playing music. My heavy backpack and camera bag threw off my center of gravity; I was so oafish in jumping from stone to stone that Japanese kids kept passing me, calling out to their moms who lagged behind. It was so wonderful to watch: families enjoying themselves on a warm spring afternoon, not feeling the pressure of time.

I walked around for a bit more until then sun came down, then went back to FamilyMart to grab some dinner (cold soba). That was my first night in Kyoto.

#travel diary #kyoto #japan #person

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Kyoto travel log, week 0

I’ve been in Kyoto, Japan for several days now and am still experiencing sensory overwhelm - in a way, my world does not seem to be capable of slowing down enough for me to type this entry. 

In my first few days I encountered a lot of logistical troubles and had to get out of them myself. I’m still reeling from the impact of them. Resolving small issues like that help me build confidence that I really am an adult and capable of handling the unexpected.

In this entry I’ll be talking about what my journey was like starting from my flight and ending on the second night!

My flight

I had a layover in Honolulu, HI. They gave us pineapple-shaped shortbread cookies called “Honolulu Cookies,” which were adorable! 

Flights are exhausting for me and I know I’m not the only one, but at the same time they are hyperstimulating. I always plan enough activities to do on my flights and end up not doing any of them. In this case I had brought along a book and journal but, the ambience was not conducive to studying, so I journaled a bit (i.e. documented what I’m typing now). I also watched two movies: Park Chan-wook’s Decision to Leave (monumentally touching - hoping to review that later), and BL Metamorphosis, about a young girl and old woman who bond over their love of BL comics (the premise is quite cute, but I didn’t end up finishing it).

My connecting flight was 9 hours long and this one was so painful for me to sit through. I was a bit dehydrated and the impact of what I was doing started to hit. When you’re physically trapped and unable to act right away and sleep-deprived you can get into a habit of catastrophizing about everything and wishing you could return to a less stimulating baseline. This was what I was wrestling with: an unstable mix of nerves and extreme excitement.

Finally! We arrived at Kansai International Airport (KIX) in the Osaka region (note: I’d thought KIX was located in Osaka but it’s only located in the region, not Osaka City). 

Descending the plane and immigration

An automated airport shuttle took all of us international arrivals to the line for immigration. 

I met a lot of talkative people in line. There was a lady who was visiting her best friend, a fluent Japanese speaker, in Osaka, and neither of us knew what was going on or what we needed to do with our QR codes for immigration. (For Japan, you had to either fill out an analog or digital set of forms for immigration and customs. The digital versions had QR codes to scan for expedited processing.) I also met two other students; all of our baggage got left behind in Honolulu and there was this whole confusion with the airport staff, but I won’t get into that.

There was so much Japanese around me even though we were in line for non-Japanese-nationals. The trickle of sounds was so intriguing, disconcerting. Everywhere I looked were airport signs in kanji, some of what I could vaguely understand with my rudimentary knowledge of Chinese. There was no place to sit, only a single bathroom in the middle, though the line moved fairly quickly.

Immigration took 1 hour 30 mins. I took a longer time at the window because of my student visa. By the time I reached baggage claim all the other people I was in line with had left and then I had to sort out the luggage mishap.

I stepped out of baggage claim deprived of 90lb of possessions with just my backpack and wallet and phone. It was 10:30 PM and all the kiosks had been shut down, including currency exchange and the tourist info booth (which I’d hoped to get help from). The outer shell of the airport was lit-up but the place felt so empty and devoid of friendliness. I looked behind me and the internationals arriving after me looked like they knew where they were going. I had to go find my hotel (located right in the airport) but the airport was so big I didn’t know where to go. I must’ve paced back and forth for 20 mins, scrutinizing -to-death the electronic airport map, feeling more scared by the minute as the outside sky grew inky. Then I found an emergency airport hotline and thankfully the lady on the other line spoke English and gave me directions.

I had to walk past the train station to get to my hotel. I tried to speak Japanese to the receptionist, just a simple ありがとうございます but my tongue felt gummy and I messed up in the middle, and she finished the phrase for me (... sweatdrop). I bowed clumsily, took my key card, made it to my room and passed out. 

Day 2: Konbini and train

Woke up super early due to jetlag. Was not feeling all too confident because of last night’s events.

Boiled some water and headed out to grab some breakfast at the convenience store (konbini).

There was a dizzying array of ready-to-eat foods. Pastries, egg and fruit sandwiches, salads, refrigerated udon and ramen, onigiri. And an entire aisle of ramen and curries. I got a カレー rice which turned out to have meat in it, seaweed onigiri, dried nuts & fruits.

After that I packed everything and checked out of the hotel. I knew I had a long day ahead of me and was feeling the effects of jetlag pretty strongly. My first task was to retrieve my SIM card and install it, then get train tickets and commute to Kyoto and find my second guesthouse.

When I got to the ticket booth I realized I should have lined up way sooner, when I first came out for breakfast, because at that time it had just opened and there were only about 10 people but now the line wrapped around the corner and there must have been at least 100 people. All around me I was hearing Korean and Chinese so I surmised that this was the line for short-term passes. Thankfully you could also buy IC (rechargeable) cards here, so I got mine ( ¥500 card deposit,  ¥2000 total).

Managed to come out and take a few pictures of the airport during the day.

Communication blunder of the day: I didn’t know where the train station was. It happened to be directly across from the ticket sales haha but all I saw was a giant banner with JR [Kanji] and I didn’t know what JR was, so I asked the person in front of the ticket/card reader. I knew this was a station of some sort, what I wanted to know was if it was the 電車 (densha) or if it went underground　地下鉄 (chikatetsu). He interpreted it as me asking the name of the station and not what type of station it was, so he kept saying “This is Kansai station! This is Kansai!”

After I got through and found my train, here, you can see it for yourself. The train was so clean and cute!

To be continued...

#travel diary #kyoto #japan #personal

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Thoughts on airports and airplanes

Tl;dr in this post: scared as shit of airplanes still and no amount of exposure therapy will ever calm this spiky ball of trepidation.

One of my earliest memories is of being in a plane. I remember the particulars of so many plane trips I’ve taken: on my first trip ever to the US accompanied by my mom’s friend, I’d drunk too much Fanta and taken my Daffy Duck comic to the lavatory. I remember my first encounter with turbulence, a year later with my parents, feeling the most intense surge of fear that we were going to fall out of the sky. When I became religious for a while, my mom and I would have a ritual of praying after stowing our bags while the flight attendants made their rounds.  I have funny memories. An old woman clipping her toenails on a transpacific flight, stinking up the whole row; me making eye contact with my family and trying not to laugh.

I have disjointed memories. Catching a traveler’s bug during an international flight but not wanting to be detained and trying to drag 3 large luggage cases along with my limp 110lb ragdoll frame. Feeling like Interactive Buddy the flash game; the luggage was dragging me.

I have stupid memories. Having my baggage seized and searched at LAX for some reason. Sitting with my friend at baggage claim for over 2 hours before we realized my bag was literally across the room and had been cleared hours ago. I probably have enough memories to assure you that I am a qualified traveler, but every time I go to the airport I am amazed at the fiery hop and skip of never-traveled-before kids and how leaden my legs feel. 

I have a theoretical interest in airports. They are a place all at once fraught with personal anxiety and communal excitement. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows has a word for an approximation of this feeling: 

sonder -  the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness

When I stand in line for Southwest, I can’t help but hear a mom nagging her 8-year-old and realize this is the first time that kid is flying, going from LA to SD is half your world when you’re that young; when I wait at the kiosk for Delta I see people who look like me going to my destination but I don’t know if they’re going away or going home and whether to project onto them the appropriate anticipatory prickles or post-vacation blues. 

Your brain does a good job of filtering out extraneous noise, yet, I feel like airports are a place where I don’t want to or can’t filter this stuff out, so constitutive of the concept of “travel” they are.

I also have an immensely personal connection to airports. My last “snapshot” of China, a shot that has crystallized in my memory, is hugging my grandma at the Panda statue at Pudong Airport, walking a short ways away and looking back and realizing she was wiping her eyes. Kid me would always play that gesture back and only when I became a teenager did I realize she was crying because she didn’t know when she would see me again. And only when I had turned my back did she do this because she wanted my last image of her to be her smiling and waving. That’s a story I almost never got to see on top of the others I will never get to see.

But the airport isn’t a sad place. My hopes and dreams for myself combust in the sea of voices - farewells and greetings, and I realize how wonderful and beautiful this technology is - how many people historically have gotten together and how many people are currently getting together so I can arrive safe at my destination and so that flying has become a ritualized thing. How amazing. Could people of the past centuries have dreamt of this?

#personal #travel diary #studying abroad #airplanes #airports #travel

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Recent paintings

1. Process

2. Process

#drawing wip #artists on tumblr #wip #landscape

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Revisiting my elementary school

Overcast. Chance of rain.

I went back to one of my old elementary schools to visit. It’s located in a residential area of San Diego.

It was unrecognizable and recognizable at the same time. I had a gut feeling that this was the place but this gut belonged to someone who was not me. It made me realize that I never really paid attention to my surroundings as a kid. All my childhood memories involve other people and the impressions they’ve made on me, good or bad. When did I start taking pictures of landscapes instead?

My friend came with me. I wanted him to comment on the plaster, murals, arrangement of benches. It was a weird request I guess - they were normal in every way, and yet they are of special significance to me.

Since it was Saturday we were walking along a long stretch of pavement with faded white hopscotch lines. There was a spiral hopscotch and the two of us were wondering how anyone was supposed to “play” it. I remember us kids fighting over jump roping and hopscotching and how some girls would jump rope OVER the hopscotch just to bm.

There was a creepy red structure in the distance and we walked towards it. It emerged into view - a playground, so dense in verticals that it looked tangled up, unusable. Right in the corner, a bench in kelly green. Why were these placed here, so secluded from life? From afar they looked like a fata morgana.

For a while in middle school (after having moved away from SD) I kept having dreams where I would be back in elementary school or some place with a playground, and it would come into view and then I would find there was no ground under my feet, and I would see either someone I loved standing on the play structure or one of the bullies, waving to me, taunting me? but what I recall the most is the sense of scale, the unbridgeable distance, and the feeling that they were on land and I was sinking.

Someone had set up two walls, one painted bright blue, the other in rainbow block letters “BE KIND.” My friend and I thought they were so uncanny.

There were people playing on the grass field. Here is a picture of us standing near the playground.

I didn’t know how to describe my feelings toward this place. It feels like this entire place is unstable, because it had existed in my imagination for so long, you know? No matter how visually accurate your memories are, you are bound to be surprised when you get to the real thing. Yet, I was hoping for something else, maybe a cinematic scene in which all my memories would pour out in a flood and I would be overwhelmed by the sensations and validation of touching this blacktop. Everything was just dead. Drained of life.

Locked out. Couldn’t get to the classrooms, so we stood there peering through the gate. I knew this was it, this was the school.

#personal #travel