ということです

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The newsletter is out for August. I’ve switched over to Ghost from Substack. I have my fingers crossed that it’s a seamless experience bringing everyone over with me, so apologies if there are any difficulties and please feel free to unsubscribe if you’d rather not read. Take a listen to the podcast for a little more background on why I made the switch, something I’ve been considering for a while:

Perhaps fittingly, I’m started the Ghost era of How to Japanese with a topic that I first wrote about way back in 2008: How to convey information in Japanese. I looked at ということです (to iu koto desu), an alternative to そうです (sō desu), the pattern I originally wrote about.

As a little lagniappe for blog readers, I found this interesting Yahoo Chiebukuro post where someone asked about the difference between the two. There are a couple interesting answers, and I think the best answer may not be the one with the gold medal.

The general gist, however, is that ということです is used to report unvarnished information while そうです is information that has been confirmed/refined/focused. So the latter can be taken more as the truth, whereas the former may need further examination.

Also, そうです is more of a spoken phrase, while ということです is more of a polite phrase that can be used in written contexts, which is what we see in the newsletter this month. Do go check out the newsletter for a very fun passage from the book I’m reading right now.

And I thought I’d also share this very cool Google Trends data showing search results for かき氷 over time. I mention this in the podcast:

Odds and Ends

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The newsletter and podcast are live:

This month I wrote about 奇数 (kisū) and 偶数 (gūsū). Any idea what they mean? If this is the first place you’re encountering them, give it a think before you dive into the pod or newsletter. See if you can figure it out. I think you might be able to get 奇数 on your own.

I also wrote about 商店街 (shōtengai) over on my personal site. I’ve been trying to write about them for a few months now and seeing Craig Mod’s newsletter about overtourism and The Guardian’s article on the “cult of convenience” gave me a way in to the topic that I needed. Give it a read if you have the chance.

Murakami in Athens Again

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My look at Murakami’s Distant Drums continues!

The next chapter “Athens” (アテネ) is just a two-page interstitial section that establishes the narrative for Murakami’s trip: He’s arrived in Athens from Rome, not to see any of the sites but to meet with a real estate agent who will help him find a place to stay. Here’s the first sentence:

アテネに来るのはこれでもう三度目か四度目である。 (41)

This is my third or fourth time coming to Athens.

There’s not all that much interesting or compelling in this chapter, it’s just Murakami getting things set up, but it is interesting that Murakami had been to Athens at least twice, potentially three times previously by 1986.

Last year I looked at outgoing tourists numbers from Japan.

There’s a jump between 1970-1977, and then the numbers are somewhat flat until around 1985 when the next big jump begins. So while it’s not that unusual that Murakami had been abroad, having visited Athens three times by 1986 is pretty remarkable.

Looking more closely at this chart, you can see a brief hiccup with the popping of the Bubble in 1992, but then Japanese just…kept on traveling. I didn’t notice the massive drop in 2004, which is due to SARS and the Iraq War. I’m curious what the numbers will look like for 2024, and I wonder when we’ll see the update.

The only other section worth commenting on is Murakami’s characterization of Athens, which is a small area of tourist sites centered on the Acropolis surrounded by unremarkable residential area, which of course people wouldn’t visit:

たとえばあなたが東京に来た外人観光客だとして、ひばりヶ丘とか多摩プラーザだとか西国分寺だとかにわざわざ観光に行きますか？

Say you were a foreign tourist visiting Tokyo, would you go to the trouble of checking out Hibarigaoka or Tama Plaza or Nishi-Kokubunji?

Not really being familiar with any of these areas but knowing vaguely of their reputations, I enjoyed the comparison. I’m sure these places are great these days, though. Am I wrong?

五月雨式

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The newsletter is online here! And I have a podcast to accompany it:

I’ve decided that I’ll mostly be limiting my tourist recommendations to the end of the podcast, but they won’t always be as lengthy as the posts here the past two months. This month I’ve got two quick recommendations for nice spots in central Kyoto. If I have any longer dumps worthy of a blog post, I’ll be sure to post them here.

Giorgio and Carlo

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I’ve finally caught my breath after a crazy first third of the year, so I’ve had a moment to get back to my project of reading Murakami’s travel memoir. I now have an index page and am slowly going back through the chapters I didn’t take an excerpt from. So check out the previous entries to get some context. This post is from the beginning of the trip, so not too much context is needed.

Fontana delle Api in Rome. A small circular fountain with a large sculpture that looks like a shell with three bees near the bottom where the shell meets the water.

When Murakami first arrives in Europe, he’s exhausted. When I wrote about the chapter after this, I mentioned that he personifies this exhaustion in the form of two bees buzzing around in his head, but I didn’t take a passage from this specific chapter, perhaps because the chapter, titled “Giorgio and Carlo, the Bees – October 4, 1986” (蜂のジョルジョと蜂のカルロ　1986年10月4日), is mostly Murakami spinning his wheels. He even tells readers directly that they should skip on to the next section if they aren’t interested in reading about his exhaustion:

…他人の疲弊になんかまったく興味ないという方は、とばして読んでいただきたいと思う。(28)

…for anyone with zero interest in someone’s exhaustion, I’d like you to skip and read ahead.

I do wonder if this exhaustion is partially just because of his long trip from Japan:

そんなこんなで、僕はすごく歳を取ってしまったような気がする。昨日は女房の誕生日だった。彼女の誕生日に我々は日本を出てきたのだ。時差の関係で、彼女はとても長い誕生日をもつことがだきた。とてもとても長い三十八回めの誕生日。僕が初めて彼女に会ったのは、僕らが二人ともまだ十八のときだった。十八で、酒を飲めば必ずぐでんぐでんに酔っ払っていた頃。あれから二十年。

でも僕が年をとったように感じるのはその二十年という年月のせいではない。それはジョルジョとカルロのせいなのだ。 (30-31)

With this and that, I feel like I’ve gotten incredibly old. Yesterday was my wife’s birthday. We left Japan on her birthday. Because of the time change, she was able to have a very long birthday. A very, very long thirty-eighth birthday. When I first met her, we were both still just eighteen. Eighteen, the age when you get fall-down drunk anytime you have a drink. Twenty years since that time.

But I don’t feel old because of those twenty years. I feel it because of Giorgio and Carlo.

Clearly he’s jet lagged here. And at the beginning of the chapter, he also notes that he’s on his fourth glass of red wine. Which is maybe why you see the lack of consistency with the kanji (we see both 歳を取る and 年をとる).

So while I’m sure that he’s tired from the writing work in Japan, I think maybe he just traveled half way around the world when air travel was much less convenient, hasn’t had a chance to decompress, is dehydrated, and has put back nearly a full bottle of wine. I’d wager that has something to do with it as well.

Kyoto Recommendations

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I thought I was all done with tourism for a while, but I had another friend in town this past month, and I showed her and her brother around Kyoto, so you’ll have to excuse my thoughts on Kyoto this month:

A view of Kiyomizudera at night in November 2022 with orange fall leaves illuminated and the city in the distance.

  • Sanjusangen-dō is criminally underrated and much, much less crowded than nearly any other sight in Kyoto. It is—by far, I think—the most impressive temple in the city. I’m not sure if “temple” is the right word here. I mean, it is, technically, a temple: Rengeō-in is its official name, and it was a small part of Emperor Go-Shirakawa’s imperial complex. But the highlight is the long main hall filled with 1,001 statues of Kannon. The entrance to the temple threads you into a hallway behind the statues, and when you turn the corner, the 100+ meter temple brings the vast array of statues into view. 10 rows of 50 statues stretching into the dimly lit distance with a larger Kannon in the center. In front of them are 28 guardians, including the famous Fūjin and Raijin. No photographs are allowed (and it’s been this way since I first visited in 2003, well before the Instagram era), so it’s also a forced exercise in mindfulness. I went by accident, without knowing or expecting anything, because I was heading to the National Museum just across the street and thought I’d check out a quick temple before I did. I’ve been back at least a half dozen times since then, maybe more.
  • For some reason—perhaps precisely because they prohibit photography—Sanjusangen-dō is very rarely crowded. While my family was in town, I went two days in a row, once with family and once with friends, and on the second day it happened to be Girl’s Day and entrance was free. It was the most crowded I’ve ever seen it but still was manageable. They were serving udon and other food in the courtyard, and within the temple, a stepped scaffold had been erected at the far end, just before you turn the corner to leave, so after you’d walked past all 1,000+ statues, you were able to get a view along the full length of the hall that is only available once a year. Very impressive. Do not miss.
  • On the complete opposite end of the spectrum, Kiyomizu-dera is completely overrun with tourists but is still worth visiting. The temple has such an excellent view of the city, and the structure is so impressively situated up on that hill, that even if you hate crowds, you have to be a real grump to walk away unimpressed. The best time to visit is in late November when they stay open later at night and illuminate the fall foliage. I went my first two years in Osaka but skipped this past year and kind of regret it. I recommend going on a weekday because the place is packed and it can take 15-20 minutes to wait and get the best view of the leaves. To be avoided on weekends, especially during the busy tourist season.
  • Taxis are more useful in Kyoto than elsewhere: The bus situation is pretty dire right now. On one of my visits, I hopped on a packed bus at Sanjusangen-dō and briefly considered alighting at Kiyomizu-dera with friends but thought better of it when the entire bus emptied out. We decided to see Yasaka Shrine instead, which was much less crowded.
  • Nishiki Market is, in the parlance of our times, cooked. Unfortunately, central markets like this are always one of the first things to be destroyed by tourism. 20 years ago, Nishiki was still very much a green grocer at heart. Now there’s more plastic food than real food along the main stretch. It’s so central, that it’s probably worth a walk if you’re in Kawaramachi, but the other shopping arcades in the area are nicer and the side streets have better cafes and shops. Kuromon Market in Osaka is closer to a true Japanese 商店街 experience, but even it is a bit touristy.
  • This reminds me of the French Market in New Orleans. The French Market was a truly American 商店街. It was a long, covered shopping arcade that mostly sold produce. By the time I was a kid in the 1980s, only a handful of produce vendors remained, and the rest were occupied by artisans and flea market sales. I loved browsing the used books on offer, and every fall we went to take pictures in front of the massive stack of pumpkins that appeared and pick out our own to carve. But now, all the produce is gone and it’s been replaced by trinkets and a few generic artists. I’ve even seen writers hawking their self-published novels, which you have to admire.
  • Two museum thoughts: The Kanji Museum is only OK. It’s located near Gion, so if you’re in the area and happen to be a Japanese maniac looking for something different, it might be worth checking out, but the exhibits are (as you’d expect) all in Japanese and a bit plain/oriented to school kids. You can have your 漢検 practice problems officially graded on the second floor, which is kind of cool. The Manga Museum is slightly better but not superlative. It’s in an old school building, which makes the exhibits feel a bit disjointed. They do seem to have some cool rotating exhibits, and I came away with some interesting authors I want to check out. The gift shop was only OK. I’d recommend going to a massive BookOFF instead, if you’re looking to buy stuff.
  • Hiei-zan is a nice little hike! You can walk to the trail from Shugakuin Station on the Eizan Line, which is a few stops from Demachiyanagi Station on the Keihan Line. It’s a 2-3 hour hike that’s a workout but not overly strenuous, and at the top you get a great view of Lake Biwa at the Garden Museum Hiei. From there, you’ve got lots of options. You can hike back down, or take the cable car down the Kyoto side. You could also hike down the Shiga side (which I haven’t done yet). There’s also a direct bus from the Garden Museum Hiei to Kawaramachi, which is miraculously convenient. I’d recommend standing in line early to guarantee a seat on the bus because the bus stops by Enryakuji (which I also haven’t seen yet) and really fills up.
  • I haven’t seen much beyond that recently, so I don’t feel qualified to comment specifically on anything else. The Kinkakuji-Ryoanji-Ninnaji trail was always worth the trek, but I imagine it’s crowded these days. I’ll have to check out some other areas of town so I can provide more specific guidance.

Let me know if you enjoy these tourist recommendations and I’ll see if I can dig something up for future posts, maybe not quite so regularly.

The podcast is also online. In addition to the thoughts above, I go over 例文 (reibun, example sentences) there and at the newsletter with some guidance on how to identify and authenticate Japanese phrases that you’ve never used before.

Osaka Recommendations

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I just got finished with a family visit to Japan and I haven’t put up a post of random Japan travel recs in a long, long time, so I thought I’d collect some of my thoughts here for this month’s blog post.

  • I’ll start with what may be the most controversial point. At this point in my life, I’d rather have 50,000 yen in taxi rides than 50,000 yen in shinkansen tickets. I put the 50,000 yen price tag on there because that’s the current price of the Japan Rail Pass. The price went up dramatically in 2023 from around 30,000 to 50,000 yen. Previously you could cover the cost of the pass with a single trip from Tokyo to Kyoto, just about. Add in a single day trip to Hiroshima or a quick stop in Himeji, and you’ve got a good deal. If you really wanted to cover ground, you could get great value out of it. But currently, unless you’re riding the shinkansen every day of your trip, it’s pretty difficult to get the economics to make sense. And is the goal necessarily to cover ground? I’d much rather pick a spot or two and dig deep rather than try to see everything in Japan. You might argue that the rail pass provides convenience, but the Hikari trains are so infrequent these days I’m not sure that’s the case anymore, and JR isn’t the same in Kansai as it is in Kanto; a JR pass (or even a daily subway pass) isn’t as helpful getting around locally as it is in Tokyo. Plus, if I’m traveling between Kyoto and Osaka, I’d rather be on the Hankyu Line because it’s going to put me in Kawaramachi and Umeda (not to mention that the cars themselves are nice as well). Instead, I’d recommend booking one round-trip shinkansen ticket to somewhere else (maybe Fukuoka or Hiroshima?), or potentially even a plane ticket, and then putting the savings toward taxis. Maybe my body is failing me, but having 10-15 minutes to sit and save time between destinations really helped extend my endurance over the course of the trip and helped us make full use of our limited time.
  • Speaking of taxis, Uber works well in Japan (at least in Osaka) and there seem to be a lot of promotions available. The Ubers here are tied in with the taxi system. There did seem to be some other cars available, but they were no cheaper than the taxis, which arrive really quickly. There are also vans available in the app for larger groups. For many of the rides we used, there were 75% or 35% discount promotions. In Kyoto, some areas (like Kiyomizu-dera) are blocked off and you need to set a pick-up location outside of them, and in Osaka some narrow streets required selecting a pick-up spot a short walk away, but this didn’t ever cause much of a headache. I caught an Uber at 4:45 a.m. on my parents’ last day here so that I could meet them at their hotel and get them to the airport on time for check in, so time isn’t an issue either.
  • Speaking of airport transportation, Itami Airport (the domestic Osaka airport) is pretty easy to access by public transportation, but it’s also a manageable taxi ride for a group. The “limousine” buses pick up near Osaka Station, but it’s not exactly the easiest location to find, and the earliest buses leave just before 6:00 a.m. and arrive at 6:20 a.m. So if you need to arrive earlier, or if transportation to Osaka Station is difficult, an Uber isn’t an unreasonable price to split. The costs I was seeing were around 5,000-6,000 yen, which isn’t terrible if you have 2-3 people riding. My family wanted something that would take reservations (which I learned later that you can do within the Uber app), so we ended up hiring a bus from Nihon Kotsu which was easy enough to set up, and we were able to get them to pick up at two separate locations at 5:30 a.m. It cost 20,000 yen, but we split it between five people. They were very, very easy to work with via phone and email, but you need to know Japanese.
  • Overall, Osaka is a great place to visit. We had an awesome time with my family. I won’t say it’s a forgotten part of Japan—we do get our fair share of tourists—but we’re not bombarded like Tokyo and Kyoto, except for a few main tourist districts, notably Dotonbori, Shinsekai, and Umeda. Many of the other neighborhoods were super easy to get around. Only Dotonbori rivals the worst of Tokyo and Kyoto’s crowding. I will say that it’s difficult to say where to take people here. Sure, we have Osaka Castle and Dotonbori, but I’m not sure if anything else has the same awe factor as the temples in Kyoto and cityscapes of Tokyo. Personally I’d take the quiet backstreets and 商店街 (shopping arcades) of Osaka almost every day, but tourist expectations are a bit of a different beast. If you’ve got a discerning eye for weathered urban Japan, come see us in Osaka. In the newsletter this month, I call Osaka a “matte finish” city, which I thought felt appropriate, compared to the glossy finish of Tokyo and the lacquer finish of Kyoto.
  • The Tenjinbashi-suji Shotengai and the area around JR Temma Station is the best and most underrated neighborhood in Osaka. I put my parents at a hotel near the shopping arcade, and they had a great time. It’s a well-trafficked, healthy area with a combination of businesses that have been there forever and some that turnover, bringing new life to the neighborhood. On a random Tuesday weekday at midday, there were a steady stream of locals walking up and down the arcade, I imagine transferring between subway stops and the JR or vice versa. There are cafes, restaurants, bars, boutiques, a lovely shrine in Osaka Tenmangu, and all of it is within a five-minute bus/subway ride or a 30-minute walk of Osaka Station. The weekend vibes in the Temma area in particular are probably what most tourists want in a visit to Japan: narrow alleyways, groups talking loudly over ホルモン hotpot or kushikatsu, wine bars, craft beer pubs, random back-alley takoyaki. It’s got everything.
  • Nakazakicho is a curious little neighborhood! Near the northern terminal of the Tenjinbashi-suji Shotengai, Nakazakicho Shotengai shoots off perpendicularly to the west and ends just before the heart of Nakazakicho, which then blends into Chayamachi, a neighborhood on the outskirts of Umeda. Osaka is basically a grid city, but the grid breaks down in Nakazakicho, and it feels like Tokyo 下町 (shitamachi) combined with Brooklyn; there are countless cafes, boutiques, izakaya, antique stores, used clothing shops, and other businesses that speckle the neighborhood. The strange part is that it doesn’t feel overtouristed, for whatever reason. One of my brothers stayed in an Airbnb in the neighborhood and had a great time exploring. Personally I’d prefer to be closer to Tenjinbashi-suji if I was a tourist, and as a long-term resident the neighborhood would feel a little too “loud” for me (but it’s not actually loud in terms of volume…just foot traffic), but you might prefer something closer to Nakazakicho if you’re visiting.
  • It’s really easy to get a suit made quickly in Japan! My parents forgot their wedding outfits, so we had to get my dad a new suit. Suit Select had one for us with the pants hemmed within an hour. Obviously it’s not going to be a perfect fit, but it looked really nice, and only cost 60,000 yen, which feels like a much steeper price in JPY than it does in USD at the moment. I think there are probably more affordable options to be had at retailers like Aoyama (洋服の青山) or even at Uniqlo, which can also hem pants very, very quickly. I just didn’t think putting my 70+ father in a Uniqlo suit made sense, ha.
  • We had to get much luckier with my mother, and what bizarre luck we did have. I did a Google Maps search around their hotel, which turned up the appropriately named 着物再生工場 (Kimono Reuse Factory). This is a small company that takes old kimono and repurposes them into dresses. Their main location is in Tokyo, but their (very small) Osaka branch happens to be three blocks from where my parents were staying, which was incredibly convenient. I emailed with them and arranged a time to look at a few options. My mom thought them through, and we went with one option which looked really nice. This, combined with a friendly, neighborhood salon right across from the shrine which did my mom’s hair the morning of the wedding, created an easy solution for what could have been a nightmare situation. My mom actually wants to have a dress made with them now, so I might be hunting for used kimono in the near future. I’d highly recommend their dress rental services and their dress making, if you’re in the market. The rental only cost 20,000 yen, which seems very reasonable compared to some of the tuxedo rental prices I was seeing (upwards of 40,000+ yen), although having a dress made with them would cost a good bit more.

Check out the newsletter for a deep dive into 筋 (suji). And here’s the podcast with more on this interesting kanji and everything above:

Collector’s Mindset

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I just sent out the February newsletter and podcast. This month I wrote about a phrase I encountered last summer while prepping for my annual Murakami fest. Give it a listen here:

You can see the blog post for that entry here.

One of the phrases really stuck out to me, and it’s one that I’ve tried to incorporate into my active Japanese: あとになってわかったこと (Ato ni natte wakatta koto). I won’t translate it here. Click over to the newsletter to see my explanation. Or better yet, listen to the podcast and hear how I’ve been able to take this phrase and expand it into other usages and patterns, nearly all of which I’ve been able to confirm examples for. Pretty neat, especially since they are patterns that I’d never heard before but was able to construct on my own. This is, essentially, how you learn a foreign language. Imitation, adaptation, and eventually creation. You can confirm your new creations by comparing with other examples online, like the blog post from a new father I found.

In the newsletter I’ve also got some strategies about how to best develop your eye and ear for sentences that are interesting, helpful, and useful.

The hardest part is realizing that a sentence is interesting, but the next hardest step (which is basically just as difficult) is to then prompt yourself to write it down to peruse in the future with the goal of increasing exposure. You’ve got to do both.
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And I’m glad that I didn’t forget to share the link for this great (and very extensive) Wikipedia page: 最長片道切符 (saichō katamichi kippu). Can you parse that from the kanji alone? It’s three two-character compounds lumped together, and I bet if you take them in reverse order you can figure it out pretty easily.

At any rate, that’s the Wikipedia page that inspired my interest in the book I’ve been reading lately, which I talk about in more depth on the podcast. Fortunately for me I was able to escape the gravity of my Mercari 積読 addiction and get these pages off the shelf and onto my eyeballs. Keep that pedal pressed.
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On a quick closing note, please do check out my call for comments and opinions at the end of the newsletter. I’m curious to know what readers and listeners are thinking. Do you like having the monthly newsletters mailed to you? Do you prefer that over a blog-style publication? Are you reading both the newsletters and blog posts? If I shifted to a different newsletter platform, would you be willing to read there or do you prefer Substack?

I like the balance between the newsletter and blog with more casual, off the cuff posts here and more feature-style writing on the newsletter, but it would be nice to have more control over the platform (and Substack has some pretty obvious issues). I spent a weekend looking into Ghost as a potential option, but it does seem making a switch would mean taking on another monthly bill and potentially a good amount of tech work (if I were to self-host). I’d love to hear what you think, and if you listen to the podcast I go into a little more details about the tech side of things. If anyone has any experience or thoughts on that side of things, I’d love to hear from you.

状態・状況

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The January newsletter is out, which means the podcast is also out!

I wrote about another Impossible Pair, this time 状態・状況. Give the newsletter a read and the podcast a listen for more details.

One thing I realized while writing is that 状態 (jōtai) is more of a video game word than 状況 (jōkyō).

Take Pokemon, for example. There are lots of different 特殊状態 (tokushu jōtai, special conditions), as they are termed. This is when your Pokemon is poisoned, paralyzed, burned, or inflicted with sleep. Each of these are a 状態 – the “condition” that your Pokemon is, at the moment, in.

This is further support for the idea that I write about in the newsletter that suggests the time element to the difference between these words. Take a look at the newsletter for the full details!