On Tuesday Kuniko called my school for me and let them know that I was sick. I was playing a little hooky, and it was nice to sleep in for a change.
Rather than do a lot of fun stuff I stayed indoors mainly, working on my Japanese vocabulary, doing the laundry and sorting out the house a little bit since we’ll be having students coming in two nights in a row.
A while back I was looking everywhere for a simple kid’s picture dictionary in Japanese, so I could find out the names of lots of simple daily things that slip through the cracks of my vocab study. I gave up my search after not finding anything comprehensive, and getting a lot of blank looks from employees and friends. Today I was looking at a Japanese language study site on the internet and found a review of a book that was interesting.
I walked over to the bookstore at Ito Yokado, and found the book there. I looked through it, and it was amazing. It had everything I needed, and more. Everything was illustrated and it was written in Japanese hiragana script so I can read it even if I don’t happen to know a kanji. The book is huge – it will take a long, long time to read it all.
Next to that book were two others by the same author, and they were just as impressive. One was a language usage guide for kids, showing with pictures what expressions fit what situations. It was huge as well. The other book was a smaller book that was filled with names for things based on various categories – things at home, foods, things at the store, things at an airport, etc. While the dictionary is organized alphabetically, this one was organized by situation.
I wish I had all these books after my first year of studying Japanese. For years I’ve been avoiding some fundamental words or expressions that I didn’t know – using language crutches to get around them. I bought all three books. They were big and expensive, but I think they will be invaluable from here on. A little embarrassing to be seen reading them, but who am I trying to impress?
In the evening I headed into Osaka, with my spare ticket to the concert because Kuniko was tied up at work. I showed up and met Yasu, and surprisingly got a message from Kuniko saying that she was unexpectedly free and could come to the show. We waited for her, and despite a slight train delay we had time to go meet Antoine and get to the show.
The show was really good – Cake sounded great and it was a really fine-tuned performance. There were a lot of foreigners like me at the event, which caused various reactions among our group of four. Antoine was completely at home, Yasu was pleasantly surprised, I was felt slightly uncomfortable, and Kuniko was also not too thrilled.
Kuniko and I don’t try to avoid foreigners, but we don’t go out of our way to hang out with them. In general they are noisy, they tend to ignore (or not know) the social rules of the Japanese, and there is this air of superiority that they carry – it is hard to describe. It’s interesting to see how my view of foreigners has changed over the time that I’ve been in Japan.
Cake played all their favorite songs, and some surprising country tunes, made a few references to Bakersfield, and then did three encores and left. We left soon afterwards, and began the long trek back. We’ll all be tired tomorrow morning!
