It’s so weird having class for more than two weeks at a time… everyone back at Stanford is fretting about midterms and I just got off our Golden Week vacation. Golden Week is three national holidays that just happen to lie close enough to each other that many people get the whole week off. So convenient…

Friday I made my first attempt to get money from the US through a so-called “international” ATM. It was a royal pain, so much so that on my fifth ATM when it finally worked I literally jumped for joy. I felt like I had just won at a slot machine. That night was our Welcome to Japan party where students from four Japanese universities converged on the Stanford Center to try and speak English, while we tried our best to speak Japanese to them. Each of these schools has either an international exchange club or an English-speaking society (though members need not really speak English). Still, there was something like a 3 to 1 ratio of Japanese to American students.

So it was no surprise when I got accosted by three Japanese students who had just barely introduced themselves when I got hit with it: “What do you think about the war in Iraq?” The others in the group whacked this guy to scold him for bringing up such a sensitive topic, but he was grinning ear to ear like he was about to meet his first right-wing war hawk. Once I made it clear I wasn’t in the “let’s bomb Iraq today” camp they all relaxed. He was wearing a t-shirt with a caricature of a woman he told me was “the Japanese Rumsfeld”. She’s part of a right-wing nationalist faction that’s arguing for Japan’s remilitarization. Rumsfeld has become somewhat of a pop icon, because his name’s so hard for Japanese to say—on TV game shows the host will spring the challenbge on one of the contestants and laugh maniacally as he stumbles through it.

Japanese game shows are unequivocally weird. Last night I was watching one called “Beauty and the Beast”, which just finds beautiful women who (in real life) have ugly boyfriends. The norm is something with a few contestants in a studio though, with an annoyingly loud host and a token gaijin. Said gaijin usually speaks fluent Japanese but utters maybe one or two lines the whole show. Don’t ask me what the point is, I think just to lend an air of sophistication to an otherwise crude show.

Saturday I went to Kobe (yes, earthquake Kobe) with people from SCTI and from Keio University in Tokyo. From the moment we got off the train and saw signs advertising “the America of Kobe,” “the Italy of Kobe,” and “the France of Kobe”. Sure enough, we climbed a hill steep enough to be Lombard Street to end up in the old gaijin houses quarter. A bunch of homes from early Dutch settlers had been preserved and turned into tourist attractions. These weren’t famous gaijin by any measure, but the novelty of seeing a 100-year-old gaijin house draws throngs of Japanese each day. Where else could you see a toilet that was once used by a real gaijin ages ago? My favorite was the description of the rooster on top of the Weathercock house: allegedly not a weathervane but there “to reinforce Christian doctrine of living in harmony with nature.” Riight…

Monday we left for Golden Week, clutching our guidebooks and our JR railpasses. We got to Nagasaki with no idea how to get to our hostel. Outside the train station, a taxi driver took pity on us and walked us to the hostel (a five minutes’ walk) for free. Then we headed off to Glover Garden—another disappointment if the magic of a Western house is lost on you. It was pretty…but the main attraction is reconstructed gaijin houses, complete with little placards (apparently the bedroom of one house doesn’t really contain a bed). The hostel was kinda nice though, as hostels go.