Penny Hero (dot) Net

So, today was my first day of actual “work”. My brain is really tired… lots and lots of names that I really have no hope of remembering… our little uchi really is pretty small though. I counted six people including myself. the rest of the office is pretty big, but I expect I won’t have to remember anyone elses name… except for our Bucho, (head dood)… whose name I already forgot.

so, today I was introduced, watched a 10-year-old orientation video, and then watched a new orientation video that didn’t yet have any english (my first job is apparently to translate the japanese and write a script for the english audio), and then I sat and poured over a bunch of pamphlets and tried to read them… so much fricken kanji. I have NO IDEA how the previous intern survived. I watched her little news-clip and it seemed that her japanese sucked more than mine… maybe her reading skills were awesome or something.

But yeah… you’ll notice my tired and bitter tone… but it’s not from work… I had to say some horribly sad goodbyes yesterday night. Before today, I’d been spending time with these high school students from Austria, and I feel like I became really good friends with a few of them… alexandria and Rupert especially. They’d been here for a few weeks already, doing a kind of community/tourist exchange coordinated through the office I’m working for and I got to tag along for a while. Anyway… so… yeah. good friends, then… last night was their goodbye party….

I tried so hard not to cry… but I couldn’t help it. I think I surprised Rupert a lot. after he saw me crying, he kept looking at me with this… kind of different expression. like it something he’d never seen before. I surprised myself too. I mean, I barely know these kids. I just feel like they’re part of my family. Hah. even now I’m crying a little remembering. At the last minute at this party, I decided I wanted to give a little speech to say thanks. It was this strange (and probably rude) hybrid of Japanese and english… basically saying how surprised I was to have given a window into a totally different world (austria) when I came to Japan and how grateful I’ve been for that.

I cried almost all night last night. And I had so many dreams about Rupert and Karin and the other boy in the group, Lucas. Most of them involved saying goodbye in different ways… and lots of reluctance. In one, Rupert and I were dating, and being torn apart. In another, Lucas and I were siblings. Almost all of them took place at my mom’s house in Hawaii for some reason… probably because I invited them all to come visit me in Hawaii this winter, when I hope to try to go back.

God, I miss them. They are still on their airplane…

but yeah… so since I didn’t sleep well, today it was hard to be genki and happy because I was all depressed and tired. I just wanted to come home and sleep. But I made it through the day.

So, I have a better idea of what kinds of work I’ll be doing. The office I’m in is in charge of things related to community safety and community awareness, especially in regards to foreign residents. They put on cultural activities and classes, and even japanese classes run by volunteers. There’s all kinds of literature about what to do in case of earthquake, fire, and pregnancy (ha ha, I kid you not. it’s published together like that) translated into english and korean and chinese.. Yadda yadda yadda.

So anyway, today I spent most of my time studying kanji, trying to look up unfamiliar words from the pamphlets that I might need to um… know. I had lunch with Watanabe-san (my neighbor and the coordinator of this internship thing) and then I attended a japanese grammar class (taught in japanese) as a guest student.

I think this class was the most fun part of my day… I already knew the grammar that they were teaching, so I didn’t learn anything new there, but I learned words like “noun” and “connotation” and “conjugation” and stuff… useful crap for grammar nerds like me. The text book will be uber useful too because all, and I mean ALL of the kanji in that book has its reading above it. so yeah. I’ll be studying kanji like a mad pirate tonight.

Tomorrow, I’m hoping to no longer be depressed about my friends. I have images of falling cherry blossoms in my head now, thanks to my japanese culture teacher, who drove that cultural metaphor home 18-gajillion times an hour…

But… it makes sense, as cliche as it seems. My whole experience here would not be “whole” without this kind of motion between the happy and the sad. And I think this kind of pain really is mostly pleasure, in a cathartic kind of way. All this scary new stuff… new language, new friends, new family… it’s hella scary in a way. But this kind of goodbye-pain is important, and because of it, I feel like I’ve shed a little blood here in Japan, and now I’m becoming part of this place.