学校の最初日 - Gakkou no saisho-bi - First day of school

The sakura have bloomed and are already falling. It's stunning. I wish I had the mindset to sit in zazen under one and contemplate the transience of existence as the petals swirl like snow around me and settle in my hair ... but I am way way too busy because the Japanese Spring semester has officially started at Ritsumeikan Daigaku.

I walked out of a hour-long class today to see the previously bare pavement covered with pink-white petals. There's this one tree on campus - I think it's a sakura, but its blossoms are especially pink ... maybe a plum blossom - which is especially beautiful. It puts the one in my backyard (above) to shame:

The Intensive Japanese Language Track which I'm enrolled in had its placement test last week. To my surprise, I made it into C class (Intermediate). Yatta! So for the the whole of today I've been talked at in Japanese and understood maybe 5% of what's been said to me - and only then because 5% of Japanese conversation is made up of the phrases 'Sou desu ka' (Is that so?) and 'Sou desu ne' (That's so, isn't it).

To cheer myself up (because you can never cry when you're eating something as delicious as matcha mochi!) I bought a Japanese sweet and took it home. I thought I would warm it up for half a minute in the microwave to simulate the delicious hot mochi I bought from a vendor in Teramachidori last week.

The end result:

Do you know how hard this sticky crap is to scrape off of stuff? Yummy though.

The cute inu next door was totally eyeing the gooey goodness too.

Now that the Japanese Spring semester has officially started, the one thing I am excited about is joining a saakuru.

In Japanese universities, student extra-curricular organisations can be divided into two kinds - clubs (部/bu) and circles (サークル/saakuru). The club members are the ones you will see practising their thing - whether it be soccer, kendo, or jumprope - several hours a day, six days a week. They are 'sugoku kibishii' (super strict) and competitive and don't really want people to join who can't make the time commitment or, say, will only be here for half a year. At least, that's the impression I got when I asked the kyudo (Japanese archery club) members (in Japanese) if they let foreign students join. There was enough diplomatic silence and awkward smiling to answer my question. If I hadn't thanked them graciously at that moment and left with one of their fliers, they might even have said "chotto..." and my cultural rejection experience would have been complete.*

Instead, I turned to the more inclusive, beginner-friendly saakuru. Some of them are really keen for foreigners to join. Like the men's soccer and badminton clubs, who were "manager recruiting" and said they wanted me and the other female exchange students to try out for that prized position. I told them i didn't know or care anything about soccer or badminton, nor could any Japanese I knew, with the possible exception of "ganbatte kudasai!" (do your best!), be useful in a sports managerial position. To which they answered, It doensn't matter. After I had said "chotto" a few times - that word is really, really useful - one of the Japanese Buddies explained that these guys wanted some kind of 'glamour (i.e. Western) girl' to grab people's attention. Strange...but funny.

I ended up joining a volunteer circle which plays in a kind of big brother / big sister role with Japanese children from single-mother families. I'm also interested in a toy camera (lomography) circle (will post on that another time if I do end up joining) and a circle which aims to forge links between Japanese and exchange students. Am going to the Hanami parties (flower-viewing parties which are more like picnics ... you spread out under the sakura and drink sake) in connection with these circles & my I-House. According to one of the American co-ordinators of the SKP program, it's "super fun to watch the Japanese get absolutely wasted" and therefore an unmissable cultural experience.

Tanomishiteimasu!

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* "Chotto" - literally, "(it's) a little...", aside from being used to indicate a small amount (chottoshita koto - trifling matters / chotto matte - wait a second), is a polite, face-saving way to reject someone who asks you on a date in Japan. It's usually 'meant'/'taken' to mean "inconvenient" as in "Saturday night is a little inconvenient for me", but you both know what you really mean.