Osaka Castle

There's a beautiful ride right near my place around the grounds of Osaka Castle. The Castle is situated on a peak and the surrounding park is large, so I had seen it in the distance a number of times as I made excursions near my place.

Last night, I went for a ride around it with a guy named Vince, who I met when I first got here. At night, there are relatively few people around and you can ride fast through the corridors of the massive walls, over the moats, and eventually into the inner sanctuary. The castle itself is lit up like a massive beacon. As we charged in, I imagined a samurai army swarming the grounds, scaling the walls over the fallen bodies of their underlings.


As is the case with many Japanese Castles, however, the main tower of Osaka-jo (大阪城) is a reconstruction. The modern structure was opened to the public in 1997 and replaced an earlier reconstruction that was destroyed by Allied bombs during the Second World War. What remained of the original tower was destroyed during the Meji Restoration, when the grounds were turned into an army barracks. The current reconstruction is conveniently outfitted with an elevator, which you see in the foreground of this picture.

Today, Ken and I went up to the northern part of town to meet with Takanori, a specialist in Indian mathematics who was a Ph.D. student in the States with Alex. Takanori and I will meet once a week to read some texts, so we had a preliminary discussion of how to proceed. Since the Kansai region has one of the biggest concentrations of specialists in the history of Indian mathematics in the world, Ken was adamant that I should study Sanskrit with Takanori and begin to read Indian texts as soon as possible. At length, however, it was agreed that Takanori and I would read Arabic on Monday, and Ken and I would read Greek on Wednesday. We then all read a few theorems of the Spherics.

Settling in...

My map book has already been a huge success. Yesterday, I was able to flawlessly pull off a full day of excursions on the JR rail system, and today I immediately found a nearby Seattle's Best from a list I had saved on my computer. The fact that there is almost no Romaji also forces me to stay in the Kanji head space, which is good.

Ken and I have started reading Theodosius's Spherics. Since I have neither books nor internet in my place, I am not able to fully prepare my reading of the text before I go to our weekly meeting. In fact, the first few times, I was simply reading the Greek on the spot when we met. Since the text begins with simple mathematics and the Greek throughout is in the standard mathematical idiom, this has so far presented no problem. Nevertheless, this evening I'll prepare a bit for tomorrow's meeting.

Navigation

Without internet access at home, just doing basic navigation to places I need to get to, but don't yet know, has risen to a new level of difficulty. For those who do not know, a Japanese address is based on an entirely different system than a western address. Whereas a western city is known by neighborhoods, streets and intersections a Japanese city is divided into large wards (ku, 区), smaller townships (usually machi or chou, 町), numbered sections (chome, 丁目), numbered zones (literally cardinal number, ban, 番) and finally buildings.

In a North American city, a street is a street by virtue of the fact that you can drive a car on it. In a Japanese city, there are many different kinds of streets. Some streets are strictly for walking, some for walking and riding, some for driving and possibly riding, and some freeways that are only for cars. (There are also other venues for walking and riding that are not technically streets at all.) In Osaka, a good half of the streets were never meant for automobiles. The only thing that unifies all of these different transportation spaces is the fact that they are not buildings. (In fact, however, there are some streets, roadways and train tracks on top of, or underneath, buildings.) Only the larger thoroughfares and freeways even have names. Many of the the streets are so small only two or three people could walk abreast.


A Japanese address scopes in from the more general to the more particular, instead of beginning with a specific place and then stating where that is. So, it states the prefecture, the city, the ward, the township, the numbered section and zone and finally the building. The arrangement of the numbered sections and zones is not perfectly predictable, so that even people who live or work in a specific chome will not necessarily know where another block-sized zone is within the same chome. Because of the syntax of a Japanese question, whenever I ask for help with directions at a convenience store or post office, they always know what I want before I even finish the question. They take out a map and study it for a few moments before turning it around showing me the location of the ban or building I'm looking for.


I have a bilingual map of the Kansai region with pretty good coverage of Osaka, but it's not nearly detailed enough to find anything in a reasonable amount of time. Today, I bought a Japanese map with full detail but all in Kanji. Fortunately, the pronunciation of place names is also difficult for Japanese people, so there is furigana above many of the Kanji. I plan to put this map to much use.

Isolation

My furniture arrived this morning and I'm starting to get settled, but my lack of internet access is hugely frustrating. I found a long list of supposedly free wi-fi sites in Osaka, but almost all of them are either defunct or actually unavailable.

At this point, the only place that I am sure has free wi-fi is Seattle's Best and there are relatively few of them in the city. Today, I spent almost an hour looking for one that was supposedly near me before giving up and going to one that I knew in my old neighborhood.

The amount of memorization I'm doing, along with the stress of two moves in a month and trying to get a bit of writing done each day has caused my brain to go into overdrive. I feel a constant pressure in my head, such as I usually feel only after a long day of productive work. My thoughts are hyperactive at night in a way that I have not experienced in years. I've become absent-minded - getting off the elevator on the wrong floor, taking the subway one stop too far.

At least, however, I now have a desk in my apartment, so that I no longer need to type with my laptop actually in my lap.

New place

I finally moved into a normal apartment. It's much bigger than the old place and cheaper, but was empty, so I had to fully furnish it. The heat is back in full force, so the last two days have been pretty intense.


I spent all day yesterday carting stuff back and forth on the subway, dealing with the gas, electricity and water companies, registering with the local ward office, and dealing with various other logistical technicalities. Of course, there was much paperwork, and two parking stickers for my bikes.


Some things are very simple, but others are needlessly complicated. For my electricity, I simply turned on the meter outside my apartment, filled in a pre-paid postcard with my address and bank info and put it in a nearby post box. The'll just take the money out of my account each month. My internet, however, is going to take two to three weeks to get going - once I have all the forms properly submitted, which I have not yet been able to do. And this despite the fact that my place is already set up for optical fiber.

The expenses involved in my move have also been strangely lopsided. I was able to buy all the big items I needed from two girls who are moving back to the States for so cheap that it cost me nearly as much to have them moved to my new place as it cost me to buy them. For my mattress, I decided to go Japanese style and get one that can be folded up and put away, but I insisted on getting a double (140 cm wide). This is very nearly the largest mattress that can be purchased here and buying it meant paying more for my mattress than for my refrigerator, washing machine and sofa combined.

The two movers who picked up the furniture were quite efficient and I never had the slightest inkling that they might break anything. They had these huge, padded sleeves that they pulled over everything. They then packed it into parceled sections in a large truck. I paid for two parcels.


The new neighborhood I'm in is more central, but also more working class. The level of racism is also a bit more intense. Everywhere I go, shopkeepers at the smaller places will follow me around. At first, I thought they were just trying to be helpful, but the way they follow my every move makes it clear they think I'm likely to try to steal something at the slightest opportunity. Today when I was looking for some things for my new place, three proprietors made sure I knew I wasn't welcome by trying to block my entry and asking me what I was looking for. Nevertheless, they were too polite to actually kick me out or to prevent me from entering when I walked directly toward them. At first, I thought it might be amusing to walk around and ask them how much things were, but that got old pretty fast.


View Larger Map

Here's a map of my new place. The large site just to the east of me is Osaka Castle. I haven't had a chance to check it out, but I've heard there's some good rides around it. I'm now in "Central Ward" (Chuo-ku , 中央区).

Language

This will probably be the first of many posts on this topic. In a beginners class for Japanese they start by teaching you the standard polite forms of verbs, which is fine if you want to say something polite to someone, but doesn't always help if you need to know what people are saying to you. In fact, the only people who use this polite language with me are some women and people working in shops and restaurants. In some cases, service workers will use even more obsequious forms that I do not fully understand.

Today, I was looking for a nearby post office (yuubinkyoku, 郵便局) and decided to just ride around and ask people and see where that got me. I asked all kinds of different people. At first, it was almost impossible for me to tell what the old men were saying to me. Eventually, I realized this was because they were using the plain verb forms, which I still do not know very well. According to my textbooks, the direct use of this form is reserved for friends, family and one's social inferiors - such as children. In fact, however, this form is in fairly common use. Most of the men seemed annoyed at my presence and two simply dismissed me with a waive of their hand and the exclamation that they did not know or care. The younger people and women, on the other hand, were generally polite and helpful. Or at least, I thought they were. Nevertheless, I was not able to find a post office in this way.

On three different occasions, I was sure I was told to go forward three lights and take a left. But there were always further instructions, such as go down, or up or around. I spent almost 45 minutes doing this before I decided to just go to a post office that was not that near, but was at least known to me.


The vast majority of mobile communication here is done via email sent to and from one's cell. I've taking to writing bits of these in Japanese. This is actually much simpler than it sounds because the phone has all kinds of auto-complete features built into it. So for example, if I can only remember the first few syllables of a verb form, the phone will offer me a list in which I can easily see the form I want. It also has Kanji conversion, so again it's usually enough just remember the first few syllables, or to just hunt around for a bit until I see the right character. The only draw back to this is that people will generally respond to Japanese in Japanese. On the one hand, they always correct my Japanese, which is helpful, but this and the rest of their response is usually full of a bunch of Kanji that I don't know.

Nicotine

A few weeks ago, I met a guy named Kazuya in a cafe who told me about some drop-in Japanese classes that he teaches as a volunteer in a suburb up north. So today, I gave him a call and got directions to the class. I was feeling a little drowsy when I was on my way to the train, so I decided to stop for an energy drink.

In every convenience store, there's a large rack of energy drinks and jellies. I thought I'd try one of the brightly colored jellies that comes in a foil pack. I scanned the ingredients a bit quickly, but I saw that there was some caffeine and a bunch of vitamins in one of the orange ones, so I figured I give it a try. On the short train ride up, I started to feel a bit funny, so I took another look at the ingredients. Somehow, I had failed to notice that there was a big whack of nikachin (ニカチン) in the drink. As I haven't had a cigarette, or presumably any other nicotine, in over seven years, you can only imagine the effect. Luck ally, it wore off pretty quick.

The class was in the Bible Gospel Church. There were actually a bunch of different classes for people learning both Japanese and English. I was in the beginners group, which was taught by a woman named Yoshimura, who had studied English at UBC for 8 months. One of the two other students had done his undergrad at SFU. The class was all in Japanese and on some grammar I hadn't seen before, but I still learned a lot.

It's still hot enough in Osaka for a daily ice cream, but most of the stuff here is the soft kind. The best I've found is all imported. These are the biggest Häagen-Dazs containers they sell at my local supermarket.