Well, technically it’s not a graduation ceremony (卒業式), but a “course completion ceremony” (修了式). Just home from it now. Everyone had to make some sort of speech so I just thanked my teachers and my class and made a special note to thank Junko from the Zig Zag. I said that my mother at home is often worrying about my nutrition seeing as my cooking isn’t so great, so I’m really thankful for Junko making me a proper lunch every day at the Zig Zag. I went there afterwards and thanked her personally and thanked Declan for the Irish breakfast he made me on Paddy’s Day and for all the other help he’s given me. I got to talk to some of my teachers after too, doing my best to talk down their compliments (everyone gets the same routine, I’m sure), and got home. Tonight at 7pm at Kanayama I’m meeting my private lesson teacher for dinner. She actually suggested the same Japanese bar/restaurant (this type of place is called an izakaya, 居酒屋) as I went to last night, but it was pretty tasty so I’m up for it again. Yama-chan, it’s called, and it seems to be a Nagoya-based franchise (though I believe they have restaurants outside of Nagoya too. There’s this caricature of like the owner or something dressed in a bird-suit (cosplay? a furrie?) and their signature dish is a plate of fried chicken wings in really nice sauce, so they use little pictures of these fried wings all over the place, along with the caricature. If you look at the website you’ll see what I mean: you can see his face three or four times per page and the menu has little fried wings all over it.
When I went there last night, the first thing I ordered was “まずい青汁” (“mazui-aoshiru”), which translates as “disgusting green-vegetable juice”. I did my best to imagine how “disgusting” (‘mazui’) it was but it was so much worse than that. It was a deep green colour, with ice floating in it, and the smell was horrendous. I tried a sip and quickly washed it away with orange juice. It took a lot of orange juice to wash away. I was eating with my friend Rui and his girlfriend, both students studying English in Nagoya, and it was described as smelling like horse food. It did sort of have a grassy hay-like smell to it. I was telling Ayumi about it and she told me that usually it’s not considered food for humans.
After Yama-chan’s, we went to a traditional Japanese ice-cream parlour and I had a powdered green tea (抹茶) parfait, with beans and other weird stuff in there. There were small white balls in there too, called 白玉 (“white-balls”). Rui’s girlfriend said I should ask for the gold (金色) variety (zing! Anyone get it? Seán?). On the way back to the station, we passed a building with “ヘルス” (“health”) written up in big letters and Rui’s girlfriend commented on it. I wasn’t sure what it was but when they started explaining it to me I immediately remembered the Wikipedia article I read last week about those places. Rui said how convenient it is that it’s in front of the station and I commented on how in front of Japanese train stations you can find anything, be it English conversation classes, karaoke, or cheap hotels. I explained how we don’t have these “health” places in Ireland. Neither do we have “Love Hotels” (ラブホ), nor Pachinko (パチンコ), nor Tele-clubs (テレクラ), nor Hostess/Host bars (キャバクラ), nor “meeting cafes” (出会いカフェ), nor karaoke (カラオケ… at least in the Japanese sense of karaoke), nor capsule hotels (カプセルホテル), nor many of the other defining Japanese entertainment facilities. We do have bowling though, like they do here. I haven’t done it here yet though. It was a fun night. I really noticed how much my Japanese has come on and lots of my new vocabulary came up.
Today for the first two hours of class we watched the Ghibli (that’s pronounced ‘jiblee’) film “The Cat Returns“, which was much better than I anticipated and actually quite fantastic. I recommend it to anyone. I watched it in Japanese and it was really hilarious. It was nice watching it with foreigners as opposed to with Japanese, as everyone was laughing together. Japanese people hate it when you make noise during films, but you’re allowed cry. Again, lots of the vocabulary I’ve studied recently came up and it was good practice.
I got some paperwork from Yamasa today. The first form gives my 89/97 result for the general Japanese test I did, covering basic Japanese and a small bit of intermediate Japanese. It also says my average for written is 94.6% (class avg 87.5), my average for listening is 86.5% (class avg 80.2%), and my average for conversation is 87.5% (class avg 85.3%). All grades are equivalent to “A”. Electives all show full attendance and “A” results. The bottom shows composition as “A”, “small test” as 85.7% (I’m not sure what this is), and attendance to class as 100%. Final result: A+.
The second document is a certificate of completion of course, just saying that I got through it all and that I did 239 hours of class altogether. For second level Japanese 600 hours is prescribed, so I might be able to make a stab at it, I wonder. Only problem is that it’s once a year only, in the middle of my university Christmas exams, and the nearest test centre is probably London. The next closest would be Paris. I’m not studying Japanese for test results anyway so I’m not too disappointed that I probably won’t be able to take the exam for almost two years.
