Coming of Age Day

I've been under the weather for the past few days and am really not out of the woods yet so I home those who made comments will forgive me for not offering responses. My on-line activity has been relatively limited and I spent all of yesterday in bed.

Yesterday was "Coming of Age Day", a Japanese national holiday, and it has been mentioned in many other blogs as well as can be researched regarding the traditional celebration in Wikipedia. Essentially, the age in Japan that one is considered to be an adult in society's estimation is 20. The holiday celebrates those who have turned 20 in the past year. It's interesting that adulthood comes a bit later for the Japanese than for Americans (where 18 is considered as the age at which one is an adult) but unsurprising since the Japanese spend a longer period of time dependent upon their families and take longer before they are thoroughly immersed in the burdens of adult life.

I thought I would add some of the anecdotal information I've gathered from students because it is rather different from what is usually reported. The students I have asked have said that the main thing they do is go to the local government office to hear a speech from some official. The content is usually pretty boring but is meant to "prepare" them for the change in responsibility they will experience as adults. Aside from that, my students have told me that they receive a gift from the local government. I asked the students if they got it for sitting through this boring speech but was told that this gift is sent via mail to all 20-year-olds registered at the government office.

When I asked what sort of gifts they received, I was told they were boring, pragmatic, and generally the type of things you'd already have if you needed one. For instance, one student got a schedule book. Another got a diary. I asked if our tax money was used to purchase these relatively undesired gifts and was told that the items were provided by donations from local merchants or directly from local merchants. I'm not sure if these gifts are offered to everyone in Japan or if they are more common among the various wards in larger cities since they are probably wealthier and have a larger pool of merchants to hit up for freebie gifts.

Generally speaking, this holiday isn't one the Japanese get all that enthusiastic about. It's really mainly another day off for them. That can be said about a lot of the one-off Japanese national holidays though.

Platform Traitor

I consider myself a lapsed Mac zealot. That's right. I used to be one of those obnoxious Mac users who thought PC's were the devil's spawn and ownership of one constituted a deep-seated streak of masochism.

With the introduction of Mac OS X, I took off my Apple-colored glasses as it introduced me to a whole new world of instability and hassle. All of a sudden, the solution to my problems was opening up a terminal window and typing in a bunch of arcane UNIX commands and Mac power users were smugly and snottily telling other less "in the know" Mac users that any instability in Mac OS X was somehow the user's fault. What's worse, I couldn't even empty my trash because somehow I didn't have permission to do so anymore. Mac users had gone from regarding the DOS prompt with contempt to hailing the wonders of the UNIX prompt. We were becoming the enemy.

I waited a long time to fully adopt OS X though I did give it a shot a few more times with no real satisfaction. During that time, I bought a Windows XP machine and then watched as every upgrade to OS X brought the Mac interface closer and closer to the Windows interface and not in a necessarily positive way. All of the interface quirks I disliked in Windows were cropping up into the Mac OS.

What is more, I like to play games and PCs are still better for on-line gaming and torrents, for unknown reasons, always download faster on PCs. It's not that the PC was any bed of roses either. It's just that the Mac's bed of roses was sprouting thorns and looking far less comfortable and attractive as time went on.

For these reasons and more, my husband eventually migrated to using PC laptops rather than Mac ones and I became a dual-platform user opting to alternate new computer purchases between PCs and Macs. While I've had pretty good luck with desktop PCs, my husband's experiences with laptops have been far less positive. His first PC laptop, a fairly nice Dell, died in just under 2 years and spent the latter year having a variety of quirks (like ethernet access that came and went constantly). Eventually, important enough components crapped out that the cost of repair exceeded the value of the computer.

My sister, who knows PCs far better than me or nearly anyone I know, told me that PC laptops commonly die in 2-3 years. Suddenly, Macs started to look better as I've never had a Mac laptop fail aside from a PowerBook 540c which a leaky air conditioner dripped water all over. However, there were still enough positive aspects on the software side that we went for another PC laptop.

This time, however, we decided that, if these things had a short expiration date, we'd go for the cheapest one we could. Unfortunately, at the time, we didn't consider that a cheap one, despite it's adequate CPU, gorgeous screen, and relatively lavish amount of RAM, was going to come with a totally crappy video card and game playing might be a problem.

It turned out that the video card was a problem but not in the way one might expect. It could play games but it pawned off so much of the load onto the CPU that it caused the fan to run constantly and the laptop was constantly overheating and shutting itself off. Enter the device you see pictured at the top. This is a coolpad that we ordered from Amazon Japan. It has 3 little fans that keep the air circulation going sufficiently that my husband's laptop no longer shuts down. It runs off of USB power, is light, and not too thick. It was, however, relatively expensive at 4,400 yen or about $42.

This represents yet another one of those electronic items that you can get for a song in the U.S. but cannot find cheaply in Japan. The friend who recommended this to me (hello, Shawn) said his mother procured one from Amazon U.S. for about $15. When I researched them in Japan, the prices were from $33-70 and there were only about 4 models anyway. I guess Japan just isn't getting enough cheap imports from China or Taiwan or wherever.

The Little Things

When we first arrived in Japan, we noticed a lot of little differences which shaped the experience of living here. After awhile, you grow so accustomed to those differences (or learn to work around them) that you forget they are there.

Recently, my husband and I received an actual letter from a former coworker who returned home to England quite some time ago. Since she sent us an actual letter and we're uncertain of how often she checks her e-mail (or if her former address is still valid), we decided we should send a proper letter back to her.

Since I gave up on Christmas cards several years ago, I haven't had occasion to send an actual physical letter for quite some time. Sometimes I send parcels but rarely anything that requires an envelope. I dug around in my long-neglected stationery cabinet and found what I needed and was reminded of a difference I hadn't thought of for quite some time. Envelopes in Japan don't come with the kind of dry gummed surface that you lick (like a stamp) to moisten and then close the letter. They either have nothing at all or they have a double-sided tape-like strip you pull off.

When I first arrived, I was annoyed at having to dig out a glue stick to seal letters and grumbled about how stupid it seemed to be not to have the same sort of adhesive that we use in the U.S. A few years of leftover un-used Christmas card envelopes (from cards purchased from the U.S.) which sealed themselves shut after Japan's long, humid summer taught me a lesson about why designs are sometimes different than those back home.

New Year's Cards

I've read that the postmaster in Japan guarantees delivery of cards (nengajo) on January 1st but I got my latest one today. Either my students are slack (but still thoughtful) or the postmaster is a big fibber.

My husband and I used to get more cards than we do. We don't send out any ourselves so I guess it's a suprise we get any at all. Most of the ones he gets are made by his students and handed to him in his lessons. The card at the top was one of those cards.


The same student also made the Christmas card above. She's a very good artist and I've seen some other things she's drawn by hand including a drawing of Gaudi's La Sagrada Familia in Spain. Despite the fact that this art looks somewhat fetishistic and has the torn look of modern collages, she is actually capable of drawing quite realistically. I'm not certain but I think she made these as composites on her computer and did the drawings on the computer and that's possibly why they're more stylized than her previous work. When I first looked at the New Year's card, I didn't even realize that that was a boar on the card.

A pre-made card from one of my students (who I assist with subtitling movies and T.V. shows).

A lot of my students and co-workers have mentioned that New Year's cards are a burden and they don't necessarily enjoy writing them or receiving them. I guess that makes them little different from people in the U.S. who aren't fond of the practice of giving and receiving Christmas cards. Like many old snail mail practices, the original purpose of holiday cards was to keep in touch with people who lived faraway and had little contact with you. These days, with e-mail and phones, I think people would just as soon not make the special effort on festive occasions.


Some New Year's cards include a postal lottery opportunity and the recipient can win a little money if their number is drawn. You have to compare the numbers on your card with a list in the Japanese papers. On the card pictured above, you can see the numbers across the bottom. I've received a fair number of such cards over the years but never checked the numbers. Who knows how many millions of yen I've given a pass on? ;-)

Back to Business As Usual

Today was my first lesson with a student after, what was for me, a 4-day New Year's holiday break. Today's only student was the fellow I frequently refer to as "the little old man". I don't mean it disrespectfully though I can see that it may come across this way. He's both endearing in his quirks and tedious in his subject matter.

I think I come up with nicknames like this for my students because my husband will relate to them better when I talk about them if I characterize them so. If I refer to them by name, he says, "which one is she?"

"Little old man" (LOM from henceforth to save typing) is the most athletic in my lessons despite his age. That's not to say he's an athlete outside the lesson but that he's a perpetual motion machine on the sofa. He's constantly sitting forward and back, rubbing his legs, moving his arms, crossing and uncrossing his legs, and rubbing his face. When he leaves, my sofa cover is always twisted around.

Today, I asked LOM about his New Year's activities. He told me that many Japanese people spend the first day of the usual 3-day holiday at home (if they don't go to a temple or shrine) and relax. The second and third days, according to him, are spent receiving visitors or visiting others. Since he's 64, his status is likely more patriarchal and more people come to him than his going to them.

He said that 31 relatives visited him during the 2nd and 3rd of January but it was good because more of his relatives were women than men. I found this a curious thing to say so I asked him to explain why he felt this way. He said that women are more "cheerful" and make better guests whereas men are "calm". This isn't really a surprise to me because I've been exposed to more than my share of excessively cheerful women in offices but I hadn't expected this general personality trend to extend to family gatherings.

In general, I think Japanese women have an unfair burden on them socially to be "up" and to fill an occasion with positive energy. Men can sit back tight-lipped and do nothing to further the conversation or act in ways that further the atmosphere of a gathering if they so desire. Women feel rather obliged to be the facilitators of good relations and social lubricators.

That's not to say that all women do this nor that it is something which is entirely unique to Japan. Women traditionally are seen as responsible for being good hostesses even in western cultures but I think there's often more of a discrepancy between men and women in Japanese culture on this point because man are pressured to be "manly" which generally means being quiet, composed and assured and women to be "feminine" which generally means cheerful, subservient, and accommodating.

Some of my female students seem to be naturally buoyant and bursting with positive energy whereas others find the need to put on this front at work positively draining and tiresome. It could be that the ones I find "naturally" energetic feel obliged to put on the show for me and the others do not but it's not the sort of thing I can really ask. After all, I can hardly say, "you seem really happy and energetic in your lessons all the time...are you faking it for my sake?"