I should be writing a paper instead of updating this old thing, but I'm not.

One of the first things I thought of upon checking this old place and reminiscing about my posts was that I really should get around to changing the title. I definitely did indeed spend a month in Tokyo and I definitely did indeed spend most of it studying at Sophia University, better known in the native language as Jouchi Daigaku (上智大学). But really, as I'm wont to do on big trips like that one, I wasn't committed enough to actually dole out an entry a day like I had hoped. Hopefully the historians will be able to forgive me for that should my life story somehow become imperative to learn. I like to think I made up for the lack of text with 700-plus digital photos taken. That should equate to at least 700,000 words, if the colloquialism isn't wrong.

But I digress. Yet again.

Really, I've been digressing from a lot of things today. I still have another paper to write about a memoir that I actually really enjoy, but I'm ironically abandoning that project temporarily to pursue this one.

I don't understand how I think either.

That being said, I thought I would take the time to let my mind meander post-trip and do another quasi-stream of consciousness blog with no real structure, but plenty of contemplation a plenty. I suppose a reflection on the trip and also my current relationship with the Japanese language as a whole fits into the mission of the blog, whatever that might actually be.

Let's proceed, once more, into a blog entry with italicized headings a plenty.

Man am I glad to not be studying abroad for another year in a row.

I really loved my time at Sophia University. Adored it. I may very well reapply to go to that school again either under the auspices of study abroad again for a much longer term or just on my own time. Who's to say which way I'll go? But alas, I'm still glad to not be repeating the process for another summer. The reasons are mostly personal and circumstantial. While I am a student at heart, the workload at Sophia at a time that was otherwise still vacation for me wasn't something I enjoyed. I love to learn, but I love to just live even more and sometimes that means separating education from my life. My brain needs time to cool down after what are usually fairly intensive academic fall and spring semesters, even if I tend to go about them with a somewhat casual air while they're still in progress.

But really, it also doesn't hurt to not have to fill out so much damn paperwork. Form-filling, bureaucracy, and I haven't ever gotten along completely well, so suffice it to say that I found the application process last year to be tedious. It went for a very good cause, but I also didn't want to replicate the hassles of fetching gobs upon gobs of legal forms, writing frivolous essays in which I somehow justify my motivations for applying, and just putting up with the amount of time required to get every single last detail nailed out. I can very easily grind through them if I absolutely have to. This all ultimately ties into my next thought, which can be summed up as...

Man am I glad that I'm going there this summer just for vacation.

I like to think that I'm studious and work hard when situations call for it, but I also appreciate downtime. Peace, I've found, is a necessary counterbalance to impose upon one's own life in a world often filled with hectic anarchy. Going to Tokyo under a study abroad program is a move I'm glad I made; it gave me great primers on how to get around Japan, gave me first-hand interactions with natives, and really just gave me the opportunity to live in such a vibrant international capitol.

The main problem with all that is that the nature of the program had a knack for getting in the way of my free time. I deliberately made sure I had as much time as I could spare to just roam Tokyo and aimlessly explore the streets, but the reality was that I also had commitments to fulfill while I was there, which meant I had to unfortunately put some of my own personal goals aside. Chief among these was conversational Japanese practice; the fact that a good chunk of my time was spent in English-speaking environments coupled with (admittedly) my own shyness meant that I wasn't necessarily in the best environment to practice spoken Japanese, as well as the general issues attached to being a newbie to the language in general meant that my competence probably didn't perceivably go up at all. While that example had some personal issues mixed in as well, the overall point is that certain factors at the time both within and beyond my control inhibited certain goals and desires I had in mind.

Since I more or less decided as soon as I had returned to the US that I would be travelling again to Japan in the summer of 2010, I wanted to do the trip entirely on my own terms. Save for a vague travel itinerary that might dictate when I change cities, I want my next trip to be without any inhibitions whatsoever. I'll decide how my day goes entirely and take it from there. This should ideally give me opportunities a plenty to pursue longer-term goals that I was unable to really address the first time, especially linguistically. Hopefully operating entirely freely will allow me to really try my hand at conversational practice in non-academic settings, for example, which is ultimately a matter of admitting to them upfront that I'm still very new at the language and that if they could kindly reply to me slowly, it would be greatly appreciated. That one is bound to require repeat trips and continual immersion, but having friends along with me on the trip that I've been studying Japanese with since day one should make it significantly easier. Two or three of us can probably get through a Japanese conversation much better than just me as the only speaker in the group.

This mentality also spills over into more immediately attainable goals, though, like visiting areas I neglected on the first trip. This is especially true with places outside of Tokyo in general, which is why I'm going to try to go to great lengths to visit other places (and especially the countryside!) in much greater detail when I return this coming summer.

I'm getting tired. I'd better stop this now.

I was going to ramble on a bit about how Japanese classes have gotten more difficult over the new semester now that the credits actually count towards my major and not just general language requires for liberal arts students, but really that just boils down to me having a no shit Sherlock moment and remembering that the writing nerd in me loves the opportunity to expand his methods to express himself and is ultimately okay with it.

Dammit, that wasn't really a concise summary anyway. Urgh. You get the, er, gist, though. Probably.

Anyway. I'm sleepy. I need to shower. And I have the Persona 3 soundtrack I bought from the lovely Tower Records in Tokyo playing in my headphones right now. Now's probably as good a time as any to stop this. So I will. Here's hoping I just might remember to actually post more material in the future. Without every proofreading it, of course.

Let's discuss the weather in Japan.

etc-chan went out of her way to suggest that I discuss a weather phenomenon that's very specific to Japan. It's a very tricky matter, since this affects daily life over there and I'm not sure at 3:11 in the morning that my faculties are up to the task of discussing it well. But alas, I find coherence to be highly overrated, so I shall nonetheless proceed to discuss the topic at hand.

Specifically, I want to talk about the raining Gundams which your average Japanese person has to contend with for much of the spring and summer.

But I suppose that I should take a step back and quickly discuss what a Gundam is, considering that there are people reading this who have enough trouble as it is dissecting my Japanese-infused Eigo. Such folks probably know what a Gundam is already conceptually without having a name for it. Nonetheless, Gundams are your archetypal giant Japanese robots, originating in 1970s era anime. They're designed to be humanoid in shape and are generally used to wage battle in any terrain; even outer space. There's a mythology associated with it, but I don't think there's anybody remotely sane who can actually understand it and dissect it for us laymen. So, let's just leave this explanation with a picture of one such Gundam and move on to how they affect Japanese weather patterns. Ironically enough, there'll be a life size version which will actually be standing up this summer. I think the Japanese are doing it on purpose just to remind myself of my apathy towards their giant robots.

But I digress. Gundams. They rain in Japan. It's a real god damned problem. Seriously.

Surprisingly enough, for its prevalence, the problem is almost never mentioned in tourist travel books. I myself once thought it was a joke and it in fact became a running punch-line amongst several comrades in the Japanese class. I'd adopt the nerdy American voice who pretentious pretends to know everything about Japan at random and I'd chime in about how it rained Gundams in Japan. It was awesome.

Except it turned out to be real. You can't tell from any of the tourist photos ever taken of Japan since these things immediately go invisible upon detecting flash photography, but the raining Gundams are a serious threat to property damage over there, since these things are pretty damn huge, with a height around 150-ish feet, I believe. I mean, you have one belly flop on some small town in the middle of nowhere and it's usually big enough to take out the entire shopping district.

Oh yeah, I suppose I should mention that belly flopping is the only method by which these Gundams rain down from the sky. Never head or feet first; their whole damn body has to hit the ground. Why that is, I'm not certain, but it's not because I find the imagery of a belly flopping Gundam to be humorous at this hour.

But anyway, these Gundams are pretty huge and gravity does a good job of making sure their impact causes quite a bit of devastation. Oh, and it's not like they rain one at a time when it's the season, either. No, it's a whole mob of them. It's not unusual for them to come in the thousands all at once, sometimes hitting many different Japanese cities simultaneously. Granted, given their sheer size, sometimes you have multiple Gundams land on top of each other. As you can imagine, that's an interesting sight to behold in and of itself. But they still have a general aversion to flash photography, so alas, there's no visual context to provide. Suffice it to say that they cause a lot of wreckage.

Oh, did I mention that it tends to happen daily?

Now, you might be thinking to yourselves, "Tom must be bullshitting us all because there's no way Japan could still be a thriving a country with that sort of consistent threat. I mean, it all sounds pretty plausible since the bible does a really great job at preparing people for unorthodox disasters, but even the Christian kami-sama let up on the acts every once and a while." In response, I say that I'm ashamed that you'd ever think of me that way. I thought we knew each other better than that.

Seriously.

What the hell?

I've done so much for you.

I even let my only kid marry you because I trusted you so much. I didn't object to the age issue at all; I thought my kid would be in good hands since it was you I handed them off to.

Yet this is the treatment I get.

God damn.

Bloody Americans. If this were Turkmenistan, this wouldn't be a problem at all.

Ugh.

I'll forgive you just this one time, but don't doubt me again dammit.

Still, to address your concerns, the reason why Japan is still such a successful country, especially economically, is that much of their prosperity comes from the clean-up efforts revolving around these raining Gundams. That's right; there's an entire industry devoted to removing them from the land after they miraculously, yet very consistently, fall from the sky. The Gundams themselves are never operational even while they're shooting down towards the earth, so there's no use in keeping them around. The clean-up process itself is simple. They just get those trucks that are normally used to move houses and then dump the Gundam corpses into the Pacific Ocean. It's worked out quite nicely. Naturally, there's no environmental damage and even if there was, the rest of the world is too busy still ragging on Japan's whaling practices to notice that there are shit tons of Gundams swimming with the fishes.

Wait, that's a mafia expression. I don't really know the yakuza equivalent. I imagine it's not that, though. They don't seem like the type that would take inspiration from The Godfather.

Oh, fun trivia: When the American government initially found out about these raining Gundams, they tried to send Transformers over to help out with the disposal efforts. Maybe they didn't know about the culture war that's always raged between Gundams and Transformers, but suffice it to say that their very short presence in Japan wasn't received especially well. It triggered a civil war and stuff.

You know, the things that usually happen when you try to send giant gaijin robots for diplomatic purposes. You've all read the history books, so you don't need any more examples.

But you're still cynical as all hell, aren't you? Now I know you're about to ask what causes these raining Gundams. Surely, you're thinking, there are pressure systems of some sort which indicate why this happens, much like any other weather pattern. You know what I say to that? Hell if I know. The Japanese people themselves don't even openly acknowledge that it happens at all.

Seriously.

Try asking them, 「昨日、ガンダム雨が降りましたか?」and they'll just be like, 「うそう!」while hopping on one leg and pointing a very damning finger at you. I should know since it's customary. I also know that people who haven't even had a day of formal education in the language can at least read and speak that much, so that isn't an issue. But still, you're bound to get a denial that it ever happens in the first place.

They're very delusional like that.

The ones that actually might talk will probably say how the Gundam gods, how are very, very real, are generally displeased with how many other giant robot shows have arrived to dwindle their prominence and as such use the Gundam rain to exact their vengeance upon the people. But really, I can't say for certain.

Wait, you still have one more question?

Why is it that I'm so presumptuous about your thoughts while writing this?

Oh, wait that wasn't it. It was about why I still want to go to Japan learning full well that I may be walking into a death trap, right?

Well, like all Americans, I'm a masochist. I figure that if I get into an accident involving a raining Gundam (ie: I get completely crushed by one) and I still survive to tell the tale, I can write my own inspirational book about how I survived the ordeal by asking for help in Korean, which is actually the language they speak in Japan. Not Japanese. Oh, and then I can sell the rights to have an even more inspirational movie created.

Starring Sean Connery of course.

That man is the only one worthy of depicting such harrowing ordeals and getting out of it all badass-like.

Yep.

I'm gonna end this entry on that note, too. Because it's just awesome to stop writing right after you get to the topic of Sean Connery. Really, after that point, it all just goes downhill very quickly.

So I'm going to pay my respects to him and leave it at that.

It rains Gundams in Japan. It sucks for you because you're not the ones going there in the hopes of having an accident happen and making a massive profit off of it.

Yayz.