I always encourage my friends to visit.  I like having visitors and I think it’s even more important to do so here in such a small town.  Nik, my predecessor, told me that he never got many visitors to Saroma.  This left me less than optimistic about friends visiting me, here in this far-flung remnant of empire, this village isolated from all but the rare fishing boat or mining expedition, where humans struggle against nature’s cruel chorus, their pitiful dwellings windswept and beaten from a hundred angry winters and their meager chattel at the mercy of gaunt, desperate vermin – a forsaken crag of hubris built upon the very precipice of earthly existence, unto which only the forlorn souls of broken men venture forth.

Wait, I think I’m talking about Russia, a little further north.

Saroma is actually quite accessible, with well-maintained roads, punctual trains and affordable air connections.  It’s still a little far away from happenin’ Tokyo and hip Sapporo, and that’s why I consider myself lucky to have received numerous drop-ins over the 19 months I have lived here: Hannah and Yoshi; Ilkka and Petri; Natsuko; Remmington; Jon; Roxy and Daisy, and two weeks ago, Mike and Alissa.

I’ve known Mike and Alissa for about as long as I’ve been able to sentiently know other beings.  Alissa and I were consistent and reliable line leaders in Mrs. Butler’s 2nd grade class at Swanson Elementary.  Mike and I created several award-winning high school video masterpieces.

While they are both intrepid travelers like myself, they couldn’t speak or read a lick of the Japanese language.  This usually isn’t a problem with visitors; Japan itself is safe and efficient, the people friendly and honest.  However, Alissa and Mike became hooked on the idea of taking a ferry to Hokkaido.  Even after explaining that a ferry and bus would take twenty times longer than a plane, cost nearly twice as much and me three times as complicated, they just couldn’t shake the romantic notion of travel by ship.

Alas, I couldn’t resist either, so on March 19th, I flew down to Tokyo to meet these two friends and show them the way back.  They had already chocked up an impressive list of adventures in Tokyo, causing me to wonder if they really needed any guidance.  The next day we boarded the ferry and settled into a 19-hour sea journey to Hokkaido.  There is something magical about ferries, something unique and especially exciting about setting off on a journey across the ocean.  You are departing the safe surface of land and entering a world with a new set of rules.  You pass by nothing familiar, you make no frequent stops, yet you are still part of the earth, with room to breathe, stretch.  On most forms of transportation, you board, get on, ride.  On a ferry, you truly embark.

It was certainly comforting to travel with friends who shared my nostalgia for ocean-going travel, and we quickly made use of the spacious and relaxing accommodation with a few cheap beers on deck as we left port.  Mike came up with a game then that became quite popular with children in our cabin.  Simply, the goal was to stand with both feet together and see who could remain standing for the longest.  At first, it was far too easy.  But by the next morning, as we passed the eastern mouth of the Tsugaru Strait, the seas had heightened to make the game much more interesting.

Interesting, and sickening.  Mike and Alissa had to lie down and the baths and outer deck were closed by the crew.  As we approached land after lunch, the ocean calmed, and we soon arrived into Tomakomai Port.  A few hours later we alighted into a snowy Sapporo City.  Mike and Alissa exchanged their Japan Rail passes at the station, in the midst of several thousand travelers stranded by wind and snow delays.  Luckily, we were staying put that evening, in a hotel in Susukino.  We made good use of the location, eating Ramen, playing arcade games, and singing some serious songs at karaoke.

In the morning we boarded a bus to Saroma, and arrived that afternoon, several hours late from the storm.  My girlfriend Yoshie came over that night and helped me introduce Alissa and Mike to their first proper Japanese onsen (hot spring!) experience.  Like many foreigners, they were astonished that something so mundane as bathing can become something as sublime as… bathing.  To paraphrase Mike: “Bathing or showering is normally like a chore.  This is great.”

The next day, Tuesday, marked a day back to work, but as Palmer citizens, Alissa and Mike qualify as work.  After visits to the Town Hall, the Mayor’s office, the Elementary and Junior High Schools, and a hearty school lunch, we strapped into our snowshoes and headed up Horoiwa-yama for a view of Lake Saroma and the Sea of Okhotsk.  Back to the house by five, Alissa and I prepared our ingredients for the evening’s dinner with my English conversation class, and Mike tried to reinterpret the meanings of Chinese kanji characters.  After a successful and delicious class, complete with an impromptu rendition of the Alaska Flag Song, we retired to Kaiko, a local izakaya, to sample some local fare and Japanese sake.  The day had effectively beaten all of us though, and after only a few beers we called it a night.  After all, we had a full day of sightseeing ahead of us the next day.

On Wednesday, after a drive through Bihoro Pass, Kawayu Onsen and Abashiri, the three of us had another dip in the onsen on the lake and then tried our hands at curling in nearby Tokoro.  Mike and Alissa caught on quickly, and we managed to get in a game in the last 20 minutes of our hour ice time.  We only played one end and didn’t keep score but I’d say that Alissa ended up with a clear lead over Mike.  Mike also agreed with me that the Japanese women’s team was by far the most attractive of this year’s Olympic curling teams.

Early the next morning we said goodbye at Engaru station as Mike and Alissa headed toward Hakodate on their Japan Rail passes.  It marked the end of a legendary visit to Saroma by some great friends and great travelers.  From what I’ve heard, the next week of their trip through Hiroshima, Nara, and Tokyo went off without incident or great difficulty.  Both of them are now back to the real world in the wilds of America.

Saroma, while surrounded by mountains, isn’t dwarfed by them as is Palmer or other towns in Hokkaido.  Saroma sort of melts into the softly rolling, forested mountains, many of which are small and gently sloping enough to be farm fields.  There is one mountain at the very southern edge of Saroma that is a decent peak.  Mt. Nikoro, or Nikoro-yama, is 829 meters tall (2,719 feet) and acts as a border point between the Tochigi area of Saroma and the Ainonai area of Kitami City.  My predecessor Nik recommended the mountain as an accessible year-round hike with great views.  However, the trail to the top is on the Kitami side of the mountain and I never got around to bothering.  For almost two years, I didn’t hike the tallest mountain in Saroma!  Unforgivable.

Luckily, Graham, the ALT in Kunneppu Town, and some friends headed up a few weekends ago and I was able to tag along.  The trail follows a summer access road for communications towers at the peak, so is quite gentle with ample switchbacks.  It’s also well hiked (and probably snowmachined as well).  The snow was packed down hard enough for us all to walk without snowshoes all the way to the top.

Looking north into Saroma and the sea.  The bumpy mountain center-right is Mt. Horoiwa.

Now, aside from the quality of the hike, there was one unique thing about Mt. Nikoro that I had heard from Nik, and from other English teacher friends who had hiked it – The Old Man of Mt. Nikoro.  No, he’s not a ghost or someone who will try to scare you off, but an incredibly kind gentleman who hikes the mountain nearly every day of the year.  The man, Mr. Kisaku Sato, is rather famous – the website he keeps about the mountain is the first hit on Google for Nikoro-yama (仁頃山） in Japanese.

Looking toward Rubeshibe town.  The pointy mountain is Kitami-fuji.

We had a late start in the day, and began coming down the mountain as the sun was getting low in the sky, around 3pm.  I thought perhaps we had missed Sato-san, as elderly Japanese people tend to do most things much, much earlier than groups of foreign English teachers.  But, about 1/4 of the way down from the top, there he was!  He seemed quite pleased to see us, and remembered Graham and Aisling from a previous hike.  After pointing out that the two mountains visible to the southeast were in fact Mt. Meakan and Mt. Oakan (Steve thought Mt. Meakan was Mt. Shari – I was right!), he quickly interviewed us, asking our impressions of the mountain, along with our nationality and the towns that we each taught English in.  Then he asked to take our picture for his website and after one shot, he wondered aloud “Aren’t you going to do anything funny like make a face or wave?”  We obliged and he snapped the photo below.  Sato-san put both photos and our profiles up on his site in Japanese on this nice page about our encounter.  I chose Babelfish to translate the page for the benefit of the Japanese-illiterate because it translates Holland written in Japanese into “Hoe land.”  Google translate just messed the whole thing up without any added humor.

The Genki Gaijin Group

Last month my girlfriend gave me a comic book.  It was a surprising departure from the Japanese comic books I had come in contact with before.  This one didn’t have any robots, explosions, buxom beauties or astonishing obscenity.  It dealt with Japanese linguistics and foreigners to Japan, like me, who study Japanese.

It was titled 日本人の知らない日本語（Nihonjin no shiranai nihongo), or “Japanese the Japanese Don’t Know.”  It’s written by and told from the perspective of Nagiko Umino, a Japanese woman and teacher at a Japanese language school for adults in Japan.  The general premise of the book is her constantly encountering and attempting to correct bizarre and unique Japanese usages by her students, while doing her best to answer their specific and sometimes arcane questions about Japanese words and grammar.  The book uses this theme to humorous effect, as well as a device to highlight how much traditional and specific Japanese many Japanese people never encounter day-to-day, and therefore have little to no knowledge of.

"Japanese the Japanese Don't Know"

For example, in one comic strip, Ms. Umino is teaching Japanese counters.  Japanese attaches specific morphemes after numbers when counting nouns of certain classes.  Each class of nouns requires a specific “counter” morpheme to augment the number.  In English, the closest example to this process can be seen in phrases like “two pairs of pants” or “five loaves of bread,” but Japanese is far more complex, to the point of being frustrating for learners.  In this section, she is teaching each form of counter by listing example nouns that can be counted with that counter, yet being flummoxed by students proudly announcing what they believe to be proper uses of the counter.  While teaching the counter -hon, used to count long, cylindrical objects, a Chinese student shouts out “So snakes would be ippon, nihon, sanbon, right?!” Of course, snakes are small, animate creatures, so are therefore counted with -hiki, not -hon, despite being long and cylindrical.

In later chapters the book moves beyond the “Japanese is hard” pattern, and introduces some linguistic history and quizzes designed to stump even well-educated Japanese people.  It’s this section of the book that ceases to be very interesting for the non-Japanese reader – even once one understands the answers, they remain mostly arcane and hard to apply to general language knowledge.

However, some of these sections, if rather dense, provide good insights into why contemporary Japanese, both spoken and written, came to be the way it is today.  One section rather comprehensively looks at all of the hiragana that went by the wayside as a result of post-war writing reform, but can still been seen on the signs of shops and restaurants, and therefore are likely to answer those niggling “Why did I never learn that?” questions a reader might have.

The strength of this book is the mixture of lighthearted, quickly paced humor and clearly presented material.  Its humor strikes a good balance in appreciating the quirkiness of the language that foreign students struggle with, without marginalizing the efforts of foreigners who study Japanese or caricaturing them in predictable ways.  It manages to delve into some rather difficult topics through all of this.  I recommend this book as a fun read for anyone studying Japanese at JLPT level 3 or above who feels like improving reading comprehension, having a laugh, and learning some arcane facts to nonchalantly bring up at their next drinking party.

Amazon.co.jp link here

There is also a sequel out now, Part 2

March 31st marks the last day of the fiscal year here in Japan, and everything is being finalized and finished. As such, a copy of Saroma’s 2010 Mini-Stats landed on my desk this morning, hot off the presses. I previously translated and distributed the 2009 Mini-Stats to members of the Palmer City Council and travelers to Saroma. I thought that I would update that translation with the data from the 2010 publication, and post a quick look at Saroma’s 2010 Mini-Statistics.

Here are the numbers, complete with cute clip art, as compiled by the Planning and Finance Department:

One Year in Saroma (2009)

※Water use and alcohol consumption data are current to March 2010. All other data is current to December 2009.

Overall for the calendar year 2009 compared to 2008, Saroma Town has made some improvements! Births are up, deaths are down. Marriages are up, divorces are down. Trash and sewage held fairly steady as did traffic accidents and ambulance calls. Criminal incidents increased from 31 to 40 over the year. Perhaps because of the bad economy? Not so fast – alcohol consumption was down by over four thousand gallons from the year previous – not typically associated with a bad economy. Perhaps people decided they’d rather hold off on the drinks and drive home, rather than get sloshed and take the bus? It’s possible, as bus ridership was down by almost 20%. All in all, no statistical black spots for the town. I’m going to do my part to help out by next year trying to drink a lot more on the bus after fathering a few children and catching a burglar or two. In fact, I think some of those things might be in my contract of employment.

One thing that is difficult for an American to grasp when visiting Japan is municipal divisions. Most of America is unincorporated, middle-of-nowhere spaces. Once you enter a town or city, you are then technically “somewhere” more specific than the state you are in. In Japan, every piece of land is part of a village, town, or city.  Throw a dart at a map of Japan, and as long as you don’t end up in the ocean, you’ll be in some specific municipality, even if the dart lands somewhere in the mountains.  Saroma is no different.  The map below shows the town limits of Saroma, and the neighboring towns that share the same border.

This makes it hard to compare the two towns. Saroma has strictly defined borders, and thus a nearly exact count of population within them. Palmer, on the other hand, might have a defined population within city limits, but a fairly vague number for the greater Palmer area.  It’s this greater area that really should be compared with Saroma.  If one simply looks at the official populations of the two municipalities and makes assumptions from there, it is difficult to see why Palmer has a McDonald’s, a Dairy King, a Taco Bell and two huge supermarkets, but Saroma has no fast food restaurants and only two modest supermarkets.

To help one visualize Saroma and the population density within Saroma that determines these sort of economic factors, I’ve made the following map showing the area and shape of Saroma’s boundaries superimposed over a map of the Palmer area.

Imagine that within that red line, there are 6,002 people.  That is the population density of Saroma.  If the Palmer city limits were this size and shape, I imagine the population would be closer to 15,000.

Some quick facts:

Saroma: 414 km² (156 mi²), Pop. 6,002.

Palmer: 9.7 km² (3.8 mi²), Pop. 8,201 (2008 estimate)

Map data from Google and Yahoo.

added April 12th: Butte centered size comparison map for my mommy.

My good friend Mike Beeson is visiting Japan.  He spent a few days here in Saroma, and did his best to read the Chinese “kanji” characters that are used in Japan.  Amazingly, while he had no idea what the characters meant, he was able to see them as pictures, and started creating his own meanings, based on what he thought the characters resembled.

I found this perspective refreshing and hilarious.  I asked Mike to write down what he thought a kanji should mean, based on what he felt it looked like as a visual representation of meaning.  Here is the short “Kanji Guide” that he created.  Let your mouse pointer rest over the image to reveal the actual meaning of the character.

Continue reading ‘Mike Beeson’s Fantasy Kanji Guide’