Yesterday I mentioned visiting a farm in the countryside and relaxing. Actually I have known about the farm for sometime now, and have wanted to visit, but only knew the owner as a colleague. We would meet briefly about once a year and I didn’t have his contact information. Finally, an invite to a party came and I jumped at the chance.

He seems to have a serious and respectful, but relaxed outlook on life; enjoys education of himself and others; and keeps varied interests. What more could one ask for in a friend. During the summer I had heard about an event he held last year and on this trip I found he plans to do it annually. He gathers a group of interested parties together to read Tolkien. My understanding is that each member chooses some excerpt they particularly like and reads that.

Initial reactions of common people are similar to when they hear someone wants to act out issues of Naruto. When we discussed it, he was very clear that people should not come wearing elven cloaks. Just because one appreciates good writing, doesn’t mean they have to be fanatic.

Anyhow, I am now feeling a bit better, so I threw my LOTR volume into my backpack and have started reading again. For the last few years I have really wanted to re-read about the condition of the Shire after the wars. The recent movies have washed the remnants of the actual story from my memory: time to refresh.

My decision is to read from the beginning, so it will take some time to get there, but it will be fun. Practically every paragraph of his writing contains something quotable. I love the texture of his language, his humor, his observation of social behavior.

This morning’s fun discovery was the Hundred-weight Feast to celebrate a 112th birthday. I had completely forgotten that, only remembering the Eleventy-first birthday the year before.

Recently there have been so many activities to join and I am still trying to rest my body, hence a lot flow under the bridge:

• November 1st was Tsuitachigayu which I haven’t attended since August 1st, when I was hit. Ironic that the activity which brings me peace and relaxation is one I can’t go to because I need peace and relaxation. Soon.
• November 3rd was Culture Day and we had the day off. I was hoping to attend a culture festival, but there were some political twists and the Ise Katagami artist wasn’t going to be present this year anyhow.
• A conflicting interest on the 3rd was the opening of the new Ujibashi bridge into the inner shrine. I really wanted to go, but didn’t have accurate information about the events. Recently I had a Guiness with one of the priests and got filled in for next time… in 20 years.
• November 8th there were two events, one at Saiku and another at one of my schools.
• November 9th was a festival at the Self-Defense Force airbase nearby. I wanted to go get photos of the helicopters in action.

Please don’t be mistaken, I am not missing out on everything; just, my activities have been more subdued and restful. For example, over the weekend, I went to a friend’s farm in the countryside and stayed overnight. Although it was not the 5th, we celebrated Guy Fawkes’ day: a little beer, homemade sausage, Cornish pasties, fireworks, a bonfire, good conversation, and fresh air. It was very therapeutic. Although, I forgot my pain meds, I was relaxing enough that nothing felt too severe. Maybe I should do this every weekend.

Tomorrow morning I will start riding the trains for free until Christmas! Yes, that’s right, I said free. How do you do that, you may ask. Well it is really quite simple. When I moved to Ise in May, I bought a one month commuter pass for the train to try it out and see how I liked riding the train. Every day I calculated how many fares I avoided with the pass. In June I was sure I could ride the train for six months and the passes seemed like a good deal, so I invested in a half-year pass.

My pass is valid through December 24th and cost me 109,300 yen. My estimate is that by the end of the day, I will have used 109,290 yen in fares. Hence, excepting 10 yen tomorrow, my pass has paid for itself. Even though I took a two week vacation to America and had several hospital days after my accident, the pass is still a good deal. Also, it is extremely convenient; especially when I’m running late.

Next I need to decide, with the upcoming purchase of a car, whether to renew the pass or try commuting in a vehicle for awhile. We’ll see.

Week four of the ‘M’ column is the sound me, remember the vowel sound here is like the ‘e’ in pet. We write it in hiragana as め and katakana as メ.

Meriken (メリケン) is one of the ways we write American in Japanese. It is an older way; a lot of people in their 70s and 80s still refer to wheat flour as merikenko (メリケン粉) – the flour from America. Most people now say amerika (アメリカ), the difference reportedly occurred because in English we speak with a stress accent. Often Japanese people misunderstand English because they miss syllables – Japanese having no stress accent.

Meisousuru (めいそうする・迷走する) is to wander or to stray. When I first started practicing calligraphy I heard this often. Not knowing the path the brush should take or lacking the confidence necessary leaves a stroke that wanders and has weak edges.

On my walk to the station there are alot of old houses wedged together. Often they are so tight that one stairs out a window into a sheet metal wall. Recently one of these places was torn down, an outbuilding was turned into an office, and the rest became a parking lot. It looks very sharp and presuming a business eventually makes use of it, perhaps it is a sign of progress.

For me it means I can cut 10 meters or so off my commute by going through the parking lot. When I’m running late this is a benefit; however, this morning I experienced a down side to this improvement.

Normally I love to greet people when I am out and about. So much so, that it is almost reflexive. Walking through the new asphalt today: I glanced left, saw a head, and stopped short of greeting the man just in time. He was inside an open window, but that might not stop me from greeting someone. In this case, the clincher was that he was sitting on his toilet. Anyone walking through will see his morning affairs.

Whether the odd fruit of my conversations reflects on my peculiar nature or not is up to you to decide. Two terms I’ve picked up are moreru (漏れる) and onesho (お寝小).

Anyone making the connection between the two terms is a step ahead. Moreru is a verb meaning ‘to leak’. When a child has to go to the bathroom very badly and they are told to hold it, at some point you will hear this exclamation. Basically, this is the “I can’t hold it any longer” announcement: “It’s going to leak!”

For the record, I have never personally heard this, because cruelty suffered in my childhood has left me with a sensitivity to this issue. Whenever a student in my class asks to go the bathroom, they are given immediate access. If I see a student looking like they might be in distress because they don’t want to interrupt my class, I discretely check if they need a break. Now that I’ve defended my name, on to the next term plus a little explanation about remembering terms.

Onesho means “bed wetting”. This one came up because most homes air out bedding on a certain schedule, hanging it over balcony railings. When I noticed a place with all manner of bedding out on a day that didn’t seem to match their schedule, the first idea tossed out by a Japanese person was ‘bed wetting’. Although I say ‘idea’, they spoke with absolute confidence. Imagine your most embarrassing frailties having to be presented to the world. Now imagine it in a society where nothing is considered worse than embarrassment.

So my promise about learning new words. Often a new word in Japanese is just a bunch of sounds (particularly since there are so many homophones), whereas a new word heard in English provides us clues about it’s etymology. When I first heard onesho I had no idea what it meant, but when I looked at the kanji characters in my dictionary it became easy to remember. This is a great benefit of using kanji. Each character is basically a drawing that carries information. Many words are a combination of characters which carry a more complex meaning together. In this case the first character is ’sleep’ and the second character is ’small’. At first this may not seem obvious unless you know the terms for ‘urine’ and ‘feces’ and ’small waste’ and ‘big waste’. Neshoben is a three character phrase meaning the same thing and a little more clear. I think I will never forget this term now. Let’s hope I don’t need it in conversation.

One reason we selected my current apartment was the relative beauty of the surroundings; for example, a kindly man with a cute cat grows a garden in front of my stairs. Having a little more greenery around the place is nice, plus I can chat with a cat every morning on my way out.

My first week here, I was left wondering how beneficial it was when an odor kept wafting into my office. Mistakenly I thought he was burning garbage in the garden and including a lot of plastics. When I realized the truth I’m not quite sure, but it exonerated the kindly man.

Two blocks from my apartment we have an old bandai sento (番台銭湯) of which I will surely write more later, but for today it is a public bath. This also seemed like a plus, but is the source of my mysterious odor. Everyday they fire up an oil furnace to heat the water. It’s not bothering me now, but we’ll see about the Springtime when I want to leave the windows wide to suck in the fresh air.

Well, instead of posting, I’ve been getting rest and healing; however, I’m happy to announce that this week’s Sunday Soundcheck is on schedule. Just for grins, since I’ve got a little time, I may write up a few and post-date them.

The third sound in the ‘M’ column is mu, written as む in hiragana and ム in katakana. A little side story related to the katakana character: such a simple looking character is often the hardest to write properly with a brush. Yesterday I was writing my clean copies for October to submit to the calligraphy society. The kanji character for ‘window’ (窓) is fairly complicated and has the katakana ム inside it, which proved the most difficult to get correct.

Muumin (ムーミン) is the name of a character, Moomin, in a book by Finnish author Tove Jansson. The characters from an animated series based on this book are very popular in Japan and adorn many products.

Most of the Japanese words starting with mu are words beginning with the kanji character 無, which means without. I struggled a bit to find words that didn’t start that because they are usually words like ’sugar-free’, ‘non-caffeinated’, and such. Although there are some amusing ones: I wrote about one a couple years ago.

Muchi (むち・鞭・笞) is a whip. This word has been popping up lately when we are discussing disciplinary and teaching methods. The Japanese equivalent of “carrot or stick” uses the word for whip. Also, when discussing my recent rehab many people want to talk about whiplash accidents.

Musou (むそう・夢想) is a daydream or fantasy, and musouka (むそうか・夢想家) is a dreamer.

Upon first coming to Japan, I often heard foreigners say things like:

• It is rude to eat while standing
• It is bad to eat while walking
• You can’t eat on the trains

I always found it amusing because I never heard it from Japanese people, just the foreigners. Also, on the Shinkansen, beautiful ladies roll carts of food through the cabin for sale; clearly it is OK to eat on the bullet train. Often school kids commuting are eating their jam-filled buns on the train platforms or standing around on the train.

Regardless, my job at the time required me to often be eating on trains, train platforms, or on the way to trains. My worst days involved catching a train before 8 in the morning (after working late the night before) and be riding a bus or train, or teaching a class straight through until about 11 at night. All the times I did this, I just assumed it was just more crazy foreigners with their misconceptions about the place we live.

My girlfriend worries a lot about proper behavior and appearances, so I asked her about this recently. Naturally, anyone who knows me knows this means asked questions ad nauseum. Generally it is not so much that these things are rude, as that they are considered embarrassing; hence most people would never do these things. Being rude is frowned upon, but doing something embarrassing is right out.

Students eating on the platforms or the trains are just unabashed. Eating on the train might be OK, if the seats are facing forward, so people don’t directly notice your food. If there are bench seats facing the center of the train, so that you can be seen, her recommendation is that you refrain. (Of course, the bullet train is an exception, perhaps because it seems like a plane and you expect to be on it for a couple hours or more.)

Please don’t tell her that I still often eat breakfast on the train; especially now with my schedule confounded by rehab.

Yes, yet again I was too busy on the weekend to write the Sunday Soundcheck. Occasionally I write them ahead of time, but was swamped from Wednesday night through Monday night.

Our next sound is mi, which doesn’t sound too different from the English word ‘me’. It is written in hiragana as ひ and in katakana as ヒ.

Mizukusai (みずくさい・水臭い) when written in kanji, is made of the characters for water and stink. One of my dictionaries lists three definitions. Number three is Kansai dialect for light or weak salt flavor. Number two is watery, in a bad way. Number one is a difficult concept where, although someone is on familiar terms with another, they seem indifferent, cold, or stiff. Recent discussions about how to understand perplexing behavior from Japanese people, yielded this term.

Mishin (ミシン) refers to a device first brought to Japan from America in 1860, we call this a sewing machine in English. Apparently there were few machines in use in Japan at the time and very few in homes, so they simply referred to it as machine, but the sound is quite different from the English.