150 years after Perry arrived...

Before I proceed to tell more of my trip after HIF, I would like to make up for something I have missed but was extremely memorable--The 150th Anniversary of the Opening of Hakodate Harbor. 150 years ago when Commodore Perry first arrived Hakodate in the ships with American flags, the people in Hakodate were scared and confused at the sudden appearance of these alien-looking human beings with powerful weapons and speaking in strange tones. However, as 150 years lapsed, Hakodate residents, just as Japanese people always do, accepted their foreign ways and integrated it into their daily life. The tranquil town is scattered by western style churches and consulates with pointed roof and round windows. After passing by an Italian Gelati store, a mongolia barbecue restaurant is just around the corner...Hakodate people enjoy their way of living and are proud of the diversity of its culture and the autenticity of its historical sense.

The biggest event of the month-long celebration is composed of a parade followed by a firework show on a Saturday. Luckily enough, we as HIF students got the chance of participating in the parade by dressing up as various roles involved in that era of history. Sarai and I became the ice venders at Japanese matsuri.

No, but that's not it. On the biggest parade cart, there was a small booth, where people sit in and hit the drum according to the beat of the crowd's chanting. And the booth ROTATES! It looked like the coolest thing in the world, so when a local asked who wanted to volunteer to be on the booth, Sarai and I jumped for it. So our state throughout the whole parade is demostrated by the picture below.Trust me. It definitely did not feel as cool as it appears to be. They did a couple of test runs before the parade--rotating us for three times while we kept drumming. Seeing the world spinning around us while staring at Sarai's excited face across the drum from me was a once-a-life-time experience, had to say. They also assured us that they would blow a whistle before they started spinning us, to draw the crowd's attention as well alert us. When the real parade began, with the first blow of whistle the booth started to rotate...once...twice...three times...four times?? Why doesn't it stop? I started to feel nauseous. After six rotations when it finally came to a stop, I could vaguely hear the crowd cheering at both sides and see faces floating around me. I was so glad it was over. Little did I know at the time...I wonder if six has some special meaning associated with the festival, because the process was repeated for six times, each time six rotations. When I finally got onto my feet...well, you imagine.

Before the parade, we were luck to have a picture with three Miss. Hakodate. "sonna ni kawaikunai..." Somebody commented.

My classmates from HIF who signed up for their roles in the festival earlier were excused from the dread of sitting on a rotating booth. Standing majestically on the stage, dressed up in the 19th century European fashioned outfits were the "ambassadors" from all over the world that once left their footprint on the beach of Hakodate. However, these prints were washed away by the tides. They were absorbed by the earth and became part of the unique identity of the city inseparable from its native culture.
They hosted a thank-you dinner for all the participants of the parade. I met this really nice local college student who seemed to be constantly amazed at everything I said about the US...or just everything I said. Japanese courtesy teaches people to respond enthusiatically in a conversation to the other person's words. That is why you can always hear exclamations such as "Soo desu nee!" and "hee~~~" from Japanese people out of their habit. This friend of mine, nonetheless, definitely carried this principle to its extreme. We had a great conversation about Japanese language, the festival, arashi, and his future job--a kindergarden teacher. He would be a good one, for sure.

Second Stop: Sendai!

Sendai matsuri is also one of the three famous matsuris in north-east Japan. We expected it to be quite similar to aomori matsuri but it turned out to be something quite different. We arrived Sendai on August 8th at around noon after a two hour ride of sinkansen (bullet train). Here you will have to admire the speed and efficiency by which the Japanese people travel. No wonder the airline companies in Japan never make profit--when a commute between two cities far apart on the map could be as easy as stepping onto the train and leaning back, maybe taking a nap, who would take the trouble to drag suitcases across the gigantic hall of an airport?

The theme for the Sendai matsuri is "tanabata"--Festival of the Weaver. The legend of the Weaver could be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanabata. The Chinese version was slightly different. It is interesting to see how Japanese molded their social value of "一生懸命" (work hard as if all your life is tied onto one string) into the story when the Tentei punished the two lovers by separating them because they derelicted their duty and squandered their time.

Just as the pictures show, huge cylindrical decorations hung down a from an arched roof all the way to one meter above the ground alone four or five sections of corridors. The colorful designs and intricate origamis on the decorations were an overwhelming feast to the eyes, and the feeling of the paper strands caressing your face whe I moved through them pushed by the crowd was also a memorable experience. During the normal times the long corridors must have been a central shopping area, because along the walkway shops and restaurants lined up in a glittering array, all giving out huge discounts. Some local food speicalty shops were putting out little bites of free food for people to try in order to draw them in, so we took little bites of food every here and there as we ambled along aimlessly. There was a kind of green bean sweet rice cake that was supposed to be one of their local special treats, but it didn't taste so different from a Chinese 元宵 (Chinese sticky rice ball with red bean paste inside).

Also, another kind of their exciting offer was roasted cow tongue. Tender indeed. We sat in a restaurant for roasted cow tongue at around 11 am when our stomach was ready for a real feast after random snacking tasting, and each one of us ordered a set with miso soup, rice, salad, and three slices of cow tongue. It was a weird feeling when you ate and think about what you were chewing....ewwww. But the juicy and tender meat slightly salted--otherwise kept its original flavor--was definitely worth the 20 bucks we spent.



Another attraction in Sendai is the Northeastern University of Japan, where the very famous Chinese writer, revolutionist and cultural critic Lu Xun once studied. As he mentioned in his article Professor Fujino, his teacher during his years at the university won his great respect through his conscientious teaching and his non-discrimination against Chinese oversea students. The teacher was made famous by the article later then, and Chinese universities invited him to become a visiting professor, but he politely turned it down for unknown reasons.

The statue behind me is Lu Xun. A concerned and ambitious look on his face.

First stop, aomori!

I will leave the long meditation about HIF to some other time when I am finally settled in my bedroom in China and eating the sweet juicy watermelon Beijing offers in late August. (Japan is awesome is almost every single aspect except this one--all the fruits and vegetables are ridiculously expensive. My friend has survived on banana--apparently the cheapest fruit in Japan for eight weeks. For an island country, growing vegetables and fruits must not be the most economical way of using land, and that probably lead to the current market price.)Right now I am travelling south from Hakodate to Tokyo, where I will eventually get onto the flight and fly back home. My friend and I are stopping by aomori, sendai, yokohama, kamakura, nikkou before Tokyo. I am now sitting in the lounge of my hotel in Yokohama we booked with only $17 per night. And to our great joy we found free internet! I am going to jot down some key words from each stop of the trip. Hope it may come useful if you are planning on travelling to the same places.

Aomori: aomori hanabi (fireworks) is a spetacular visual feast. People from all over northeast Japan gather together in this buzzing town and celebrate the most extravagant festival of the year. I couldn't think of any gathering in the US that has similar scale or atmosphere. Later I heard from friends that the "three major matsuri" in Japan is a term the Japanese government came up with after WWII to stimulate Japanese domestic consumption.
The matsuri proves to be more than a domestic celebration. We have seen more foreigners there than we had ever seen in hakodate, even during their biggest festival. As the pictures show, crowds and crowds of people slowly moved from one vendor to the next alone the sea coast, trying out local specialties and novelties. The men held a can of beer in one hand and a ika kabob in the other hand, dragged their feet in wooden Japanese flip flops, and with the flip flops clacking the ground was their loud voice and hearty laughs. The girls were all in colorful yukata and flowery obi (the huge bowknot at their back). They trotted in the very typical Japanese feminine steps and stopped every now and then to point at vendors that sold candybars in hellokitty shapes.

When the night fell, the fireworks rose up from the sea surface. The vendors lit up the light, and the vendor street turned into a golden band swirling itself next to the dark ocean. The crowd stirred whenever a new firework shoot into the sky and exploded. The small city was bathed in the light that lit up the sky like aurora at the magic hour of the day.

Take a deep breath, let the fireworks commemorate the end, and mark a new begining.

midterm vacation

Every year from June to August, flocks of Taiwanese swarm to Furano for the lavender flower season, when fields and fields of lavender flowers flows in the breeze like waves and waves in a purple ocean. During our naka-yasumi (midterm break), I along with my high school friend from Harvard decided to take the trip to Furano because we believe seeing is believing :)

All the hotel booking and trip planning is done through a website called jalan: www.jalan.net. Strongly recommended! It navigates you through your research and helps you find the bottom price quickly.

After the trip I have to say I am extremely impressed with Japanese public transportation. Hokkaido is overall an very rural island, and during the trip we travelled through some of the most rural areas in Japan. Still, the train runs through them quite frequently and the commute to cities takes at most an hour. All the stations have guidebooks translated into several languages and sometimes tourguides that speak several languages. Japanese really do everything for your convenience.


The lavenders is said to bloom the best from mid-July to early August. We were a little worried that our trip would be too early for the blooming season. However thanks to the abundant rain this year (said to be the most in the past 50 years), it invited an early blooming season. The flowers reveals an astonishingly pure purple that the camera could hardly capture.


On the way to Furano, we stopped by Asahikawa Zoo--the nationally famous zoo for its polar animals. Here we are, enjoying our time with the dear, the polar bears and the seal :)

Mount Hakodate

Long time no see :) Again I gave in to my terrible habit of procrastination...So much has happened that my pen could barely follow.
Every little adventure I have taken here has something amazing, but none of them impressed me as much as Mount Hakodate. I knew it the moment I stepped out of the woods, soaked in sweat (not because of the intensity of the hiking but my own lack of exercise:P), after 40 minutes of hiking among dense vegetations. Like a scroll unfolding itself, the following scenery presented itself to me:
Well, due to my poor photography skill, the picture can barely do justice to the actual astonishing beauty of the place, but even the best photographer with a first class camera could not be able to capture the moment--the ocean that hid itself shyly behind the mountains, the breeze that caressed my face, the fresh smell of grass and soil blended with slight saltiness, the line that separated the ocean and the sky that every now and then was clouded and blurred by the fog that mystically rose from the water. What a feast to the eyes!
I would very much love to recite some famous lines from Japanese poetry to express the intensity of my feeling, and maybe another ten years of learning the language would allow me to do so, but at the moment all I could think of was the classic sentence struture we learned from JSL Level 1:
海も山も見えて、とても綺麗なところですねえ！
（Both the ocean and the mountain are visible in sight, this is such a beautiful place!）

The picture below was taken the second time I visited the mountain. The day was a lot lighter and the fog was not as heavy. The mountain top gives you a good view of the whole Hakodate city, which turned out to be a lot bigger than I thought.


The time between the dusk and the twilight everyday is known as the "magic hour". The following picture was taken at the magic hour--even without dramatic sunset glow, the serene and somewhat solemn view also mesmerized me with its magic. If you were with me at the moment, I believe you would feel it, too.

北海道で一生懸命に勉強中

Sorry for the lack of update!
As expected, there is limited internet access here. I am sitting at the window of the HIF student lounge and my laptop is connected to one of the few numbers of cables they have here.
I talked to my mom and aunt online. After not seeing me for half a month they both asked immediately "how was the food?". Since this is probably going to be a universal concern and topic of interest, here is my yet to be continued journey of exploring amazingly delicious Japanese cuisine :)

There is a nationally famous morning seafood market 2 minute walk away from hakodate station--函館朝市. The last day before we moved into our host family, a couple of friends and I decide to get up early and visit there. Otherwise, we will have to travel by train in the morning to catch the 5:30 market from our host family.
I am glad we did.
Walking passing by rows and rows of street vendors, we saw water tanks with gigantic crabs that waved their claws at us;
we saw perfect-looking melons of all the same size and color put in boxes and sold as around $35 each. While we were wondering if the melon with heavenly high price really has heavenly delicious taste, we ran into this street vendor that sold slices of melon for a taste. There was 100 en pieces and 200 en pieces and I had the 200 one. All I can say is that was the best melon I've had in my life--it tasted like melon flavored icecream melting in your mouth, except infinitely better. Apparently melon is a local specialty here, and they also do national deliver service, just as the picture below shows.

I was too distracted by the morning market the whole morning after our visit at 6 am. So at lunch time, we came back to one of the many small restaurants at the area (probably as authentic as you can get for Japanese food) and ordered a meal for ourselves. This is what I got:


Ika (squid) is seen everywhere here. If the city has a mascot this is it. Isn't this the custest sign ever?
Even their manholes:
Later that day I bought a box of the most perfect strawberries. They are all of the same size, color and facing the same direction. I wonder what the Japanese people did with the ones that are not of the right size...


Japan has been amazing so far. Food is just one of the reasons that made it so, but I will stop here for this time since the center is closing down.
Thank you for reading!
until next time :)

first impression

I am sitting in the soft bed of my room in Hokkaido Kokusai Hotel, finally beginning my first blog entry. Writing blog hasn’t been anything new to me—I kept a blog in Chinese for my American life since four years ago. Now I am writing in the language I have acquired since then and documenting my life in yet another foreign country. I hope one day my Japanese would get fluent enough so I could actually blog in it :)

People say once you have mastered a new language you pick up another personality. Looking back to my experience of learning English, I have to agree. While learning a language from a different culture, part of you will adapt to the culture and that part will come out when you speak the language. However, it is really hard to imagine having a Japanese side as well as an American side in your personality, since there are so many things in the two cultures that essentially oppose each other.

In China there is an idiom “礼多人不怪”, roughly translated as “you can never go wrong with being too polite”. Japanese people are definitely the walking embodiment of this idiom. In subway, on street, at hotel…wherever I went, I am treated with the most courteous manners that involve nodding, bowing, lady-first hand gestures and of course, smiling. Sarai and I went exploring the town a little and we talked to fisherman, second-hand clothing store managers, restaurant owners, junior high school students, and I was struck by the degree of politeness they carry in their manners. I was a little embarrassed at the beginning and quickly learned to react.

Also another thing that struck me was how “majime” Japanese people are. Our orientation ran perfectly according to the schedule, not one minute off; a Japanese girl stood at the street corner and waited until the light finally turned green even though there had been no car passing by for a minute; there are five recycle cans for five different kinds of trashes in our school building, each with a carefully made sticker on it explaining its usage; when you dispose a water bottle, you need to take off the plastic wrapper and dispose it separately from the bottle…a society famous for being highly organized and civilized indeed.

Everything has been good so far. Class starts on Monday and we will know the result of our placement exam (which I don’t think I did too hot in). Before that is a free weekend and we will sure go for more adventures around the town! Being quarantined in a hotel is actually kind of fun, because this way we get to know better our fellow HIF classmates during the many exploring adventures.

Pictures will come with the next post :)