I knew all of the above, but little else, before starting the film. The biggest surprise for me was that in many respects, this movie works best when taken as a comedy. It’s a goofy, self-referential piece which doesn’t mind abandoning its dignity for a laugh. It happens to be a blood-drenched tale of a chest of gold which turns a peaceful mining village into a battlefield as well, but that’s the setting, not the genre.

This isn’t to say that the Western aspects aren’t done well. It turns out that six-shooters and samurai mix surprisingly well; the cultural traditions which both stem from have a lot in common. The wandering warrior, the feuding clans trapped in a small town, the tragic lovers who try to overcome the enemty of their people; all of these elements have their place. If there is a problem with the way these themes are used, it is that the director tried to use as many as he could think of without much regard for whether they were really necessary. However, in this case at least, it’s just a case of prioritizing the humor over the plot.

Comparisons to Kill Bill are inevitable given Tarantino’s name in the credits. There are similarities; neither film hesitates to make ultraviolence and horrible murder into a laughing matter. However, that movie took itself seriously; this one does not. Whereas that movie took the trouble to stick to a plot, this one is happy to repeat a simple pattern from beginning to end: funny scene, cool violent scene, touching scene. It is a credit to the director and cast that it succeeds at all of these.

This is not a movie for kids. It is not a movie for those who demand that a film have a reasonable setting or plot. It is not a movie to see for people who require clarity of speech. If you don’t fall into any of those categories, though, there is a good chance you will enjoy this movie.

Despite that, it was very rare for me to speak in Japanese to anyone except my teacher or my students. Speaking Japanese with my teacher was natural. I didn’t speak much in Japanese with my students, but whenever I could illustrate a new concept or grammatical structure to one in their own language, I did. My students were paying for lessons in English, but I couldn’t really expect them to pick it up entirely by inference; it seemed only natural to communicate as effectively as possible when introducing a new idea.

With everyone else, though, it was rare for me to use the language. Probably the single biggest reason for that was embarrassment. The ability to express myself clearly and concisely is important to me; when my only option is to speak poorly, I would rather not speak at all. The only surprising thing was the extent to which that was possible.

Every Japanese person spends a minimum of six years learning English in school. The degree to which this study actually helps varies widely–it is far too common for them to simply memorize huge lists of vocabulary and phrases without any instruction of how to actually use the language to communicate–but it does mean that almost everyone in Japan has a certain baseline ability to understand simple sentences. Combining those with exaggerated hand motions and facial expressions gave me a means to communicate which covered pretty much everything that really needed to be said.

Sometimes I needed to express complex ideas; for that, I had to be inventive. I established my bank account by printing out pictures of the necessary forms that I found online. I shipped a package to America, from a convenience store, using stick figures and hasty sketches of what I wanted. People were very willing to accommodate me in this; nobody in Japan really expects anyone who doesn’t look Japanese to be able to speak the language.

Despite the fact that I shied away from speaking Japanese to most people, I made real efforts to understand what they were saying. It became second nature to attempt to think in Japanese as much as possible, and use English only when I didn’t have the vocabulary or grammar to express myself otherwise. The results of that attempt were rarely correct in a formal sense, but it felt like there was some good in constantly trying. If nothing else, it kept me thinking about the language, and it was more entertaining than studying properly.

Having a background in programming turned out to be a mixed blessing. Programmers by necessity have to have a certain facility with languages; a well-rounded programmer has at least two or three programming languages they’re comfortable with, plus maybe half a dozen technologies which aren’t properly programming languages but act kind of like them. The fact that Japanese is an immensely regular, well-structured language felt very good to me, as that is a trait shared by programming languages. It let me focus on really grokking the grammar and memorizing the vocabulary instead of having to worry all the time about exceptions and irregularities which plague European languages.

However, the single universal characteristic of computer languages is that they are all designed to be understandable to computers. Spelling and grammar aren’t refinements, they’re essential elements which must be used perfectly. The best possible result of a spelling or grammar error in a program is that the code won’t compile, and you have to go back and fix things to get your code to run at all. The worst result is that everything seems to work fine, but you’ve actually introduced a weird and difficult to debug error into your code which will come back to bite you months down the line. Programmers consequently get kind of fanatical about grammar, as it always requires less effort to express an idea properly the first time instead of having to go back and fix things later.

The most natural way for me to construct a valid grammatical construct, whether a sentence or a block of code, starts with semi-verbal intent. I then arrange the components I’ve assembled according to the appropriate grammar; if there is any doubt in my mind that I have done this in a valid manner, I look to online references to ensure that I have. This is efficient when programming, and I’ve completely internalized the rules of English, but it makes for a cumbersome process when attempting to express myself in Japanese.

Could I have worked to break that habit and simply speak uninhibitedly? I probably could have, but when programming, it’s actually a habit I want to maintain. It was far too easy to just accept that for me, grammatical perfection is mandatory, and therefore construct elaborate workarounds so that I could communicate in realtime without having to dive into a reference book every few seconds. Besides, there’s a certain amount of entertainment to be derived from using stick figures and handwaving to communicate; it was a contrarian impulse that required that whenever I couldn’t just blend in and act the way a Japanese person would, I’d at least be amusing at it. I think I generally succeeded; even though I couldn’t always know what the people who interacted with me were thinking, I was having fun.

This has had all sorts of effects on Japanese culture, one of which is the fact that the woman of the family is expected to go shopping for food every day to prepare that day’s meal. This eliminates the need for a pantry or for a refrigerator larger than the one an average American might keep in their college dorm room. Though this means that food thus prepared is often wonderfully fresh, particularly as freshness of product becomes an evolutionary pressure in the stores themselves, it didn’t work well for me. It’s not just that I can make from scratch exactly one of each of the major meals (I can make omelettes, deli-style sandwiches, and steak tips with vegetables); my habit has always been to head over to a megastore and stock up on staples once a month. Thusly provisioned, I can spend my time doing things more important than worrying about what I eat.

Luckily for me, I could pretty much do away with the problem of cooking by going to the convenience store and buying a bento. Convenience stores in Japan are wonderful: they’re open 24/7, and they cram every imaginable service into a store the size of a US master bedroom. The fact that they’re open 24 hours is very odd for Japan, as no other type of business stays open then. Even the ATM machines shut down for nights and weekends. Add in the fact that they really are convenient, and combinis become almost magical. Want a hot, fresh meal? That runs about 4 dollars. Pay your bills? Ship a package? They can do that there. You can rent videos there, or stand by the magazine rack and just read. As winter approaches, they carry necessities like knit gloves and hats. If a sunny day suddenly turns to rain, the combini all suddenly have racks of umbrellas for sale. I have no idea how they achieve this level of efficiency, but it beats anything I’d ever seen in the US.

I probably ate more than three quarters of my meals directly from the convenience stores in my area. I had about an average concentration of them around me, meaning that one was 150 meters away from my front door, and there were two others available if I was willing to go as far as 500m. As common as they are, though, Japanese convenience stores don’t even approach vending machines in terms of ubiquity. If there is not a vending machine on every street corner, it is only because of the high local density of streets. There were three immediately adjacent to my house, and dozens in easy walking distance. You can buy anything from Japanese vending machines. Hot-coffee and cold soda machines are the most common ones, but there I saw vending machines which dispensed soup, beer, cigarettes, snacks, batteries, film–if a person were stranded in Japan and prohibited from ever entering a store of any sort, they could probably survive just fine on items from vending machines.

As nice as it was to live that way, I don’t think that I’ll have that kind of lifestyle again unless I return to Japan. I just don’t think that a Japanese-style convenience store and a Walmart can coexist in the same market; one or the other will inevitably be driven under. Does a society look more to price, or to value? Do people prefer that a store stock what’s necessary, updated rapidly, or do they want it to carry everything all the time? Are the employees paid minimum wage, or are they paid enough to be nice? These are all decisions made at a societal level, and I’m not positive it’s possible to make the choices which lead to Japanese style convenience stores without implying a whole lot of other choices which lead to, say, cooperation being a major graded subject in school.

What I remember most about that arrival is my Luggage. Terry Pratchett and Neil Stephenson have both written amusingly about unwary travellers carrying too much baggage. I have to say that it’s a lot less amusing when it’s happening to you live. I had imagined that the process on arrival would be like arrival at an American airport: I would pull the luggage off the conveyor and put it on a trolley, trundle it 100 yards, and load it into some sort of car. Accordingly, I didn’t skimp on space or weight: I had two huge duffels, each loaded to the 70lb flight luggage limit. I had a giant cardboard box containing a full desktop computer system and two cubic yards of packing peanuts. I had another big box containing my bicycle. I was moving, after all, and this seemed a fairly minimal set of things to take for a stay of at least a year.

The gentleman who the company sent to greet me at the airport was cheerful about my situation. A lot of people who he met, he told me, had similar situations. There was a shipping office conveniently located within the airport which could freight whichever items weren’t immediately necessary to the apartment which would become mine. It didn’t matter that the larger box had gone squishy and organic, and was slowly leaking peanuts; the shipping companies were extremely talented here. In fact, he was very nice about everything–but he never once offered to help carry anything.

I shipped off my cardboard boxes, but I hadn’t planned for a situation in which it would matter how much luggage I had, so necessary items were scattered between the two duffels. We left for the company guest house where I’d be staying: the cheerful semi-retired company man leading, and me following with 70lb of duffel in each hand. We rode the train toward Chiba, with each of my bags taking up a pair of seats, and the two of us standing between them. We left the train station and started walking to the house. It wasn’t too far, he told me: less than two kilometers. We had the advantage of good weather, too: the temperature wasn’t expected to break 30 degrees, and the humidity was only 70.

The company man had it easy: he wasn’t carrying anything. As for me, I’ll just say that when you go to experience a foreign land, attempting a 2km walk while carrying 140lb of stuff in the first humidity of summer while exhausted is not the recommended starting point.

It’s kind of funny, but I didn’t immediately feel like I was anywhere new. Yes, the roads were narrow, the people were asian, and the writing was funny, but I’d seen each of those elements before. It wasn’t until the first time I went to get something to eat that I had a really visceral understanding that I was in Japan. The company man told me that I could survive eating prepackaged meals from convenience stores, and showed one to me on the way to the guest house. The first food I ate in that country was a Strawberry Cream Sandwich (いちごクリームサンド). That sandwich provided my “not in Kansas anymore” moment; it took on a weird significance as my first step in participating in the pandemic oddness that is Japanese culture.

I slept for 14 hours that night, and woke up at 7am the next morning to a small earthquake. I was now in the Land of the Rising Sun, and those two elements had just cooperated to greet me. It felt good.

Last night, I implemented version 4, which uses Knuth’s Dancing Links algorithm to solve any puzzle. This strategy is basically impossible for a human to use, but it’s well-suited for machines. Because of that quality, it’s fairly mind-bending: I spent a few hours just wrapping my head around the general plan of how it works. Unfortunately, this had consequences: I dreamed Dancing Links last night. My first thought upon awakening this morning was “That was an interesting debug case. I should try it out in the machine to see if it really works like that.” What’s more interesting is that I am highly motivated (an unusual experience, recently) to debug this thing as soon as possible, to the exclusion of food, my job, and my Japanese class. I’m not actually going to skip any of those things, but I’m hugely tempted to, which I find interesting.

A hypothesis regarding this behavior: programming really is a much better job for me than teaching, as I seem to be desperate for it.

I never considered that such a product might be already on the market, as monkey food. But this guy did. And he’s going to try it for a week, to see what it’s like.

If this experiment works, I may have a new staple food. Edit:Of course, based on what he’s reported so far, they’ve got some work to do on the taste before it becomes really palatable…

It is not likely that it will be determined whether I’m accepted into the helicopter program while I’m still in Japan. Even if I complete all the preliminary testing here, I then need to wait until they convene a review board (which happens once per month) to interview me, and then wait for my entire packet to visit some central decision-making authority before determining whether or not I’m accepted.

Assuming I do make it into the helicopter program:

I would need to serve a minimum of 6 years active duty.

The army would handle getting me into local universities and pay for tuition up to a set amount; they let you aim for either a bachelor’s or a master’s. I think I’d head for a second bachelor’s.

I would not be eligible for cross-training; my duties would be to fly helicopters. After a few years, I could apply to switch to fixed-wing aircraft. On the other hand, I would spend the majority of my duty time flying helicopters.

Knowing Japanese does not make me eligible for extra pay, and the Army wouldn’t train me in Japanese during on-duty hours. However, I could take Japanese courses as part of the normal off-duty-time university course load.

I would live in dormatories for the duration of the training. Once I was posted to a duty station, I would have the option of living in a dormatory (free), or living off-base with stipends to pay for housing and food.

The army would NOT pay back my student loans; that’s a bonus they offer to people joining the enlisted ranks directly.

I would accumulate leave at the normal rate (2.5 days per month) during training, but I would not be able to take leave during training. This means it is likely that I would have to miss my sister’s graduation.

I would make more money than I do now.

This all looks reasonable to me. I still want to see my sister graduate, but it’s not confirmed that I’ll have to miss it–it’s only a likely chance at this point.

The last weekend of this month has come and gone, and I can say with certainty that this is not a trip I will forget soon.

It started with a rental car. One of the strongest guidelines when planning this trip was that it was to be cheap; neither my friend nor I wanted to spend more than was absolutely necessary, because near the end of the month both our budgets were stretching. There was a cheap ryokan with an onsen* (~$40 per person per night) a reasonable distance out, but it would cost $80 per person for a five hour train ride on the local trains, or $120 for a shorter ride on the shinkansen. Luckily, I discovered that it’s possible to rent a car for the weekend for only $80, so in theory we could actually pull off the entire trip for under $100 per person, which seemed reasonable.

Driving in Japan, in general, is not actually as big a transition as I had expected. It’s not very difficult to stay on the proper side of the road, and road signs are generally easy to understand, at least on such issues as the speed limit, one way roads, and general traffic control. The biggest issue is that the blinker lever and the windshield wiper lever are on opposite sides of the steering wheel; all too often, I would attempt to signal a turn and set the wipers in motion instead.

The car rental place with the good deal, however, was located in the middle of Tokyo. Driving in Tokyo is not pleasant. It’s got the congestion of New York, the street layout of Boston, and it occupies a larger area than either of those. Furthermore, the signage with respect to major roads is ambiguous and confusing, even though major words are listed in roman characters. After about 90 minutes of general confusion trying to find the proper highway out of the city, we pulled into a gas station and asked the attendant to program the car’s GPS route-planner for us**. Luckily enough, the attendant there was very helpful and friendly, and after about five minutes of fiddling with the controls he had the GPS displaying a dotted line of arrows along the intended route. He conveyed that he hadn’t put in our exact destination, but an approximation which should serve until we were closer to the destination and could get someone else to reprogram the GPS for us.

With the help of the GPS and its associated software, we soon made it out of the city and on our way. By 2pm, we arrived at the end point of the GPS’ programmed route, and sought out another person to reprogram the GPS. To our great dismay, we discovered that we were in Niigata–on the coast of the Japan sea, about twice as far as the ryokan. We had assumed that the gas station man had programmed an intermediate destination; he had instead sent us to the endpoint of the correct highway.

There wasn’t much to do at that point except curse the gas station man soundly, play in the ocean a bit, and turn around. After another four hours of scenic Japanese highway***, we finally made it to the ryokan, where we were delighted to be greeted in person by the proprietor, who spoke quite good English. After we were checked in and settled, we headed to a nearby izakaya**** for dinner, and maybe drinks. As it turned out, gaijin were a rarity in that place, and the locals were happy to buy us sake while we sang american songs at the karaoke machine and chatted with them in whatever combination of English and Japanese we could muster between the lot of us.

The next day, we headed out to the nearby wildlife park to see the snow monkeys cavorting in the natural hot springs. While there was a large colony of monkeys in the park, they seemed reluctant to enter the water until the park attendant threw some food in, at which point there was a mob.

The monkey park was at the end of a path of decent length up the side of a mountain. Across a small valley, there was an onsen for people based on the same hot springs. I must say it was much more enjoyable than the artificial onsen at the ski place, in large part because there was almost nobody else there. The indoor bath was comfortable, but what really made this onsen memorable was the outdoor bath. Apparently, though the practice becomes rarer as time passes and as population densities increase, it was common at one point for onsen to be mixed-gender installations. This practice has not entirely died out. Though the indoor baths were segregated at the baths near the monkey park, both indoor baths had doors leading to the same outdoor bath. That would have been easy for me to deal with, particularly as the mixing of genders was entirely theoretical while I was there; there were no women in attendance. What made the experience hair-raising was the fact that the outdoor bath was situated such that one had a magnificent view of the mountain across the valley, and the path up it–and all the people on the path had an equally unobstructed view of the bathers.

I did try the outdoor bath, reasoning that this was not a chance that would present itself to many people, and I would rather preserve my adventurousness than my modesty. That said, I watched carefully and made sure that there was nobody on the path before venturing between the indoor bath and the outdoor. There was one guy, however, who had no such qualms. He was standing outside the outdoor bath, stretching, relaxing, and enjoying the view. When I first ventured out, he said in decent English that the water there was too hot for him; apparently, he was not going to let this spoil his enjoyment of the outdoor scenery. At one point, he waved to someone on the path, standing tall so as not to be missed.

I didn’t stay in the outdoor bath for very long.

After walking back from the onsen, it was time for us to head back to Tokyo. We would have had a pretty smooth time of it, as it was simplistic to tell the GPS “lead us home.” However, traffic on the way into the city was inexplicably dense for a Sunday evening, and we lost an hour and a half in the jams.

Last weekend was an adventure of the sort that I’ve grown up reading about and wishing to have. Yes, we were lost most of the time, spent four times as much as we meant to*****, and had an itinerary meager enough that just reading about it is undoubtedly making the more planning-oriented members of my family cringe. At the same time, it was time spent in enjoyable company, doing interesting things (at least while we weren’t driving). It felt full, and satisfying. In particular, the whole thing felt like a more authentic experience than I expect most people have. I’ve stayed in high-class hotels in both the western and the japanese style, and I’ve done most of the touristy things to do in Japan. I’m not going to complain about comfort, luxury, or style, but I can’t help but feel like there’s a sanitized vision of Japan presented to tourists. Going on this trip, I feel like I’ve peeked behind the curtain, and seen the sort of thing that I would as a native. Being able to say that is immensely satisfying.

I occasionally buy snacks. When I do, I tend to the spicy ones. Japanese food, as a rule, doesn’t embrace ‘savory’ as a flavor concept, and even when it does, there’s an accent to it that (while good) is just different from what I am used to eating. Curry doesn’t taste like chili, even though all the obvious ingredients are identical. Thus, snacks generally fall into three broad categories: sweets, things that are savory the Japanese way, and habanero chips. Today, desiring a taste of home, I opted for the last of those.

As it happened, I was still in a snacking mood after polishing off the chips, so I opened up a box of chocolates. With the first chocolate came an insight: the residual heat from the habaneros combined with the taste of the chocolate in a way that was interesting, and not unpleasant. It led me to idly think that this might be a profitable line of experimentation in the future; chocolate is a complex flavor, which doesn’t absolutely have to be tied to sweets.

Then, entirely by accident, I discover that these guys have beaten me to the punch in a way far more stylish than what I was thinking of.

I’d say that one of my favorites is from 7-11: a product simply called “Burrito”. Its subtext advertises that “Burrito has been enjoyed for a long time with keeping the Mexican traditional taste.” It’s true, too: you can select from such flavors as Ham and Cheese, Hotdog with Curry, and Rice with Spice.

I really like that Mexican traditional taste. Particularly Ham and Cheese.