Author Archives: Daniel

Day 3 with Project Tohoku in Ofunato

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Well, I didn’t really get a chance to play with the kids today, but we did get a lot of work done, and there were a lot of kids around, so it didn’t really feel as strenuous as some of the other days so far.

We hopped on the bus with a team headed to a fish warehouse right on the coast. The area was wrecked, but surprisingly there were still some buildings standing – this may sound like a running refrain…I guess I was surprised considering some of the footage I had seen, not all of which came from Ofunato, clearly. It isn’t a total wasteland like you might imagine. The fish team had to remove a lot of rotten seaweed that had been sitting in cardboard boxes for two months. They stank so much on return that they went straight into the shower and their clothes into the wash (which apparently wasn’t that effective).

We continued on along the coast, past an immense factory (to make concrete apparently) with lots of tubes and hugely tall structures connected (like something out of FFVII), past two boats which had washed up onto the shore and stuck out onto the road, and then eventually up a hill to the school…which was untouched by the tsunami other than the temporary housing that had been installed in the school yard and some of the athletic fields. Part of this job was doing some maintenance work for the school, and the other part was PR and connection building – this was the first project that went into schools in the area, and it sounds like All Hands is looking forward to doing more work in the future.

We had two groups. The first removed cinder blocks from a garden in front of the school which we were later going to use behind a shed in back of the school. The second group, my group, was cleaning out a ditch behind the shed, organizing a big pile of wood that had been rotting behind the shed, and then stacking the cinder blocks on top of the drainage ditch. The area around the shed hadn’t been cleaned for thirty years.

The first group did wonderful. They totally cleared the cinder blocks and then took off the first few inches of topsoil to create a nice, soft area of earth for the kids to play on. At the end of the day it was great to see many of them running around on it, especially since a lot of their normal play area is occupied by housing.

The second group did good, but we weren’t able to totally finish. We moved all of the wood, threw out the rotten wood, restacked the wood neatly after clearing the area, removed all the leaves and brush from about 90% of the drainage ditch, and dumped all of the brush on a compost pile. One of the drainage ditches had partially collapsed, so we began to dig it out to stand it upright, but we didn’t have enough time unfortunately. Hopefully we’ll have the chance to go back and finish and do some other odd jobs.

The kids came out and talked with us on their recess. They were very curious, and the teachers were all thankful, especially the teacher whose tire our team leader Chris changed for him – the teacher got a flat on the way to work and had been unable to remove the tire.

One part of our team went to play with the kids after lunch, and several of the others joined in at around 3pm. At one point we helped other teachers in the school building move boxes from the gymnasium to classrooms.

I had the most fun talking with the principal of the school who was a loud, friendly guy – not your typical elementary school principal. In the schools where I taught, the principals were always nice but often secluded in their often. The one impression I have of them is that they always ate lunch really early. I always thought it was strange and possibly even rude until I learned it was a recognized procedure (apparently)…something about having someone available while others are eating or maybe to test the food for poison?

Well this principal was outside all day with us, helping rake leaves, dig dirt, talking with the Japanese speakers. He was really happy to have us there, and I hope we have a chance to go back. At the end of the day he asked us if we drank beer, which is usually a sort of indirect invitation to go out for drinks, and as we all know, real business gets done over drinks in Japan; hopefully this means that All Hands will be in good shape for future school projects.

Pictures forthcoming…

Update – pictures:

Here’s Sakari Base from the outside:

And some shots along the coast from the drive to the school:

Here’s the school we visited. You can see some of the temporary housing in the lower corner of the photo:

Paul with a load of soil from the work on the lawn in front of the school:

Ditches filled with leaves and then the finished product:

Neat and tidy pile of wood on the side of the toolshed, our pile of cinder blocks from the front garden and in the distance the compost heap where we dumped the leaves:

A nice, smooth patch of soil for the kids to play on:

Team leader Chris with the principal (on the far left) and the lucky teacher whose tire Chris changed (right of Chris):

Day 2 with Project Tohoku in Ofunato

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I was with the same ditch project, but today I was working on the canals instead. I started off taking buckets from the diggers and wheeling them to the dump site, but in the afternoon I jumped in the canal and helped shovel. For the last hour or so I was working on a different section of the canal that we haven’t reached yet. I fished out the biggest pieces of debris like roof tiles and other things and put them on the side of the road to be carted away.

Everything else other than that was the same as yesterday. We have a different team of people, so things ran a little differently, but it was all tough labor out in the sun.

Here is some of our group eating our delicious bento lunches. We ate at this small house near the work site, and the lady there made us soup yesterday and today. Yesterday she also boiled us eggs, and today she gave us cans of miso sardines. Very tasty.

This is the area of town where we were working. As I mentioned yesterday, the destruction was very spotty. Some things are totally gone; others are still standing. This photo is facing the coast, so you can see that some things closer to the coast are still standing.

Here’s a photo of a very clean ditch. I’m not sure if our team worked on this, but this is what they look like when we finish with them.

And here is the canal I was working on. This is what it looks like when it’s dirty (although we had done one pass…the section I worked on at the end was much, much dirtier).

And here’s a clean section.

A group of Japanese officials came by and took photos of us working. I gave them my email, so hopefully they’ll send them my way soon. I’ll post them up when I get them.

After two days on the ditches and canals, I’m ready for a new assignment. There’s a project going to do some work on a the grounds of a school, and I’ll be joining them. In the afternoon we should have a chance to play with the kids. I’m very excited to be back teaching again, even if it is just for an afternoon.

Day 1 with Project Tohoku in Ofunato

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After an overnight bus to Morioka and then another 2.5 hour ride from Morioka through the mountains to Ofunato on the coast, I arrived at the All Hands Volunteers base near the Sakari area of town yesterday at around 11am. I was oriented along with one other volunteer who was also on my bus.

All Hands has set up a command center in the Welfare Building in town. What I’ve seen of the main building is a small, generic Japanese office building. A room on the first floor has been cleared out and spread with temporary tatami mats. It’s being used as the main office and a common area. There is a big board with a list of teams and tasks, a corner where the All Hands staff works busily, wireless Internet that seems slow but more or less reliable, several Japanese kerosene heaters, and a shelf of luggage for the people who are living on the second floor. I haven’t seen the second floor yet, but I imagine it’s a big open area, converted office spaces, with mattresses and sleeping bags laid out.

One of the staff members drove me up to the other living area, Fukushi no Sato Center, which is about a 10-15 minute drive back up toward the mountains from base. I’m not sure how the numbers are split, but there are around 60 volunteers right now. The center is a rehabilitation center/old folks home which is currently housing some evacuees as well. It has a medium-sized Japanese-style bath on the first floor across from what looks like a dining hall. The second floor has a common room and several empty rooms where volunteers and evacuees are sleeping.

After a full day of travel, all I could manage was a quick walk down to the stores before a bath and bed. The walk was made quicker by a local lady who offered to give me a ride when I looked confused. She was an English teacher, eager to talk, and very friendly. Everyone here has been incredibly thankful for the help.

I passed out early and was up equally early. We left the Fukushi no Sato Center at 7:30 and had breakfast at the Sakari Base where we ate pancakes and had a meeting. I introduced myself along with the other new recruits and folks returning from breaks. I found out that one of the All Hands staff members is an alum from my high school. He graduated in’87, me in ’00. It’s a small, strange world. They also explained all the jobs and after we signed up.

I signed up with for a project titled “Ditch Bitches.” We were ten people and split into two groups, one of which was cleaning a larger canal with running water, the other of which was cleaning the roadside ditches in one of the neighborhoods hit by the tsunami. In the countryside, roads within towns and villages are all lined with knee-deep concrete drainage ditches. They are affectionately called “gaijin traps” because they are uncovered and foreigners have a tendency to drive into them and get stuck. In a bigger city like Ofunato, they are covered with heavy concrete slabs or grated metal drain covers. We pried all of these open and spent the day digging the mud and debris that accumulated in them. We dug up all sorts of things – broken tile and glass mostly, but also spoons, forks, iPods, broken CDs, little unopened bottled and can drinks, knicknacks, all of it covered in mud. At one point in a particularly deep, muddy section, we unearthed a mysterious frozen white liquid that was wrapped in some kind of packaging. It was still frozen after all this time.

We worked from 8:30 to noon, had an hour for a very satisfying bento lunch, and then worked until 4:30. The weather was nice – sunny and breezy, although the breeze did blow in a strong smell of rotten fish (or rotten something) that kind of lingers over the area of Ofunato near the coast, despite the fact that we were not in the immediate harbor area.

The area we were was still somewhat intact. There were a good number of buildings that are standing, and these increase dramatically as you move away from the coast toward higher ground tucked into the area between mountains.

Some houses had the first and second floors boarded up, some just the first floors, but many of the buildings had upper floors that haven’t needed to be gutted. But there are also empty lots where buildings have been completely swept away. In the distance I could see the NTT building closer to the coast that where we were, and it was large enough to still be there, but its windows too were boarded on the lower floors. On all the empty lots there are neat piles of collected metal, including some cars and appliances. We were dumping all our mud and debris on one of these empty lots using wheelbarrows. As I was wheeling one load to the dump site, I saw a plaque in the road that was marking the spot where the tsunami from the 1960 earthquake in Chili reached; needless to say, the recent tsunami went far beyond that spot.

My whole body is sore, and when I finish I will have forearms like Popeye. For now, I am glad to have Ibuprofen and glad to have been helpful.

After work, we bused back to the Sakari Base, had dinner, and did the evening meeting where team leaders reported back about the day and we all signed up for jobs tomorrow. I was tempted to sign up for something new to see a different part of the city and a different project, but I’m sort of a completionist and we didn’t quite finish all the ditches that we started today. I just hope that I don’t have to man up and jump in the canal tomorrow because I would come home very dirty. I’ll be wearing my work pants tomorrow, so it won’t be too much of an issue if I have to.

So now there’s just enough time to hop in the tub and then pass out in my sleeping bag before tomorrow. I’ve been outed as a snorer, which I don’t think bodes well for my restfulness tonight – rookies probably get a one day stay of leave on being disturbed for their snoring.

Summer Plans – Volunteering in Ofunato with All Hands

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I had big plans this summer. I was going to finish up the majority of my schoolwork by the end of March and spend April hunting for some kind of awesome internship either at a literary journal in the States or at a translation company in Japan. It was going to be amazing; haughty laughter would have flowed like wine. Ha ha HA!

When the quake happened, however, I pretty much dropped everything, schoolwork included, and focused on raising as much money for Japan as I could. We did pretty good here in New Orleans.

My summer plans suffered. I sent off one (bad) application for an internship and wasn’t accepted. Fortunately I happened to see Joseph Tame’s tweet about All Hands Volunteers and Project Tohoku. I submitted an application and sort of forgot about it. While waiting I enrolled for a summer course and started contacting translation companies about summer freelance possibilities – I was going to have some time on my hands.

I was at a crawfish boil on April 30 when I got the rejection email from All Hands. Oh well, I thought, it was a reach, and I didn’t really have any way to support myself once in Japan. The plane ticket probably would have been expensive as well. I woke up early the next morning to an acceptance email – a spot had opened up! I checked out plane tickets, sent out more emails to translation companies, contacted my old roommates, assuaged my parents’ fears of nuclear disaster, and within a week booked a ticket.

Everything worked out: a room was open in my old apartment, I’ve arranged some freelance translation work, plane tickets weren’t too exorbitant (and they bumped me up to first class for free!), and my folks actually came around on the idea of volunteering – people did come from all around the world to help New Orleans during Katrina after all.

I arrived in Tokyo earlier today. I’ll spend a few days here getting ready and celebrating my former roommate’s wedding and then head up to Ofunato, Iwate Prefecture to help on Project Tohoku on May 23. I’ll be there from May 24 – June 4, helping to clear rubble from houses, businesses, and public spaces. I’m excited to be able to help out, even if it’s for less than two weeks. I originally applied assuming that I would immediately return to New Orleans and enroll in the summer course on June 6, but I’ve decided to stay in Tokyo for the rest of the summer and do freelance work. I should be able to break even in terms of finances; hopefully I’ll come out ahead in the karma department.

If you’re interested in helping out, consider donating to the All Hands Japan Tsunami Relief Fund. Project Tohoku is scheduled to last until July, and unfortunately they aren’t taking any more volunteers, but you can sign up to receive information about future projects. It sounds like All Hands’ MO is to start grunt work relief projects as soon as possible, build connections with the locals, and then later establish more recovery-based projects, so they may need help in the future.

Collabo-Ramen – naginicai

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I was in Japan last December for a whirlwind ten days of drinking, eating, and catching up with folks. I went out to ramen with Brian on my first full day in the country, but it’s taken me nearly six months to finally put together the video footage I took – I’m a lazy bastard (and was a little busy, as well). The worst thing is that in those five months, the shop has closed! Or so Brian told me.

Naginicai is one of the shops in the Nagi chain. It’s on the west side of Shinjuku Station and serves both lunch and dinner. You can check out what the dinner options were like on Brian’s or Keizo’s blog. I took video footage of the lunch, which only offers tsukemen:

Collabo-Ramen – naginicai from Daniel Morales on Vimeo.

I’ll have to double check with Brian to see whether they’ve actually closed or not. I know that he posted about a charity event that was held at naginicai in April, so maybe they are open for a limited number of events during the year.

For those unaware, the name although written in romaji actually means 二階 (にかい, second floor), which is a good name since it’s on the second floor. Within the restaurant, they also have a small loft seating area that you can rent out for nomikai.

Cool Verb Ending – －やがる

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Over winter break, I started reading 『まほろ駅前の便利店』, one of the books on my Japanese reading list. It’s okay so far – lots of ただ-based puns since the main character’s surname is 多田 – and it was good motivation to discover that it’s being made into a drama series for Japanese TV. Sadly, though, the book was pushed aside by reading I had to do for school. And by manga.

Over winter break I had a thirst for comics for some reason. Not just Japanese stuff. I ordered The Walking Dead Compendium and have been working my way through that. I have the first two volumes of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman queued up as well.

I also brought back some manga from Japan. I was pleasantly surprised to find some Satoshi Kon manga that was recently released to commemorate his death late last year. In his roundup of 2010’s best manga over at Neojaponisme, Matthew Penney mentioned Seraphim, an unfinished project that Kon was working on with Mamoru Oshii (of Ghost in the Shell fame), but the other manga that was on the shelves when I was there was the two-volume, appropriately-titled Opus.

I’m through with the first volume, and I can say confidently that Kon fans should be satisfied by the content – it’s meta with equal parts action and awesome drawings. Light stuff, but lots of fun.

One linguistic thing I noticed while reading was the heavy usage of －やがる verbs. 言いやがる, 出やがる, 行きやがる, 心配させやがる, しやがる, やりやがる – it’s all over the place! I was vaguely familiar with the word from my project manager days – the pattern is used frequently in video game dialog – but I realized that I didn’t know the specific meaning and derivation, so I looked it up in the dictionary:

やがる
［助動］［やがら｜やがり・やがっ｜やがる｜やがる｜やがれ｜やがれ］《補助動詞「上がる」から》動詞の連用形、助動詞「れる」「られる」「せる」「させる」の連用形に付く。軽蔑や憎しみなどの気持ちを込めて、相手の動作をいう意を表す。「あいつめ、とんだうそをつきやがった」「あんなやつに負かされやがって」

As you can see, やがる is an auxiliary verb (補助動詞 – that’s a fun four-character compound to say ほじょどうし、ほじょどうし、ほじょどーし). I’ve bolded the meat of the definition: “Expresses a person’s actions with (the speaker’s) feelings of scorn/hatred included.” I added “the speaker’s” to the definition because it’s almost always spoken rather than written.

In short, it’s an auxilliary verb that means fuck. Or fucking, goddamn, damn or whatever curse word feels natural for the person and the verb that person is performing. Basically it’s a tone thing, and in English we express scorn/hatred with curse words. In Japanese, one of the ways they do it is with やがる. The content of the action being performed doesn’t differ at all from a normal 言う, 出る, 行く, する, or やる. What does differ is how the speaker feels about the action.

An example from the manga: the main character is a manga artist who gets sucked into the world of his own comic because one of the characters pops out into the real world and snatches an important page of the comic. The artist is forced to go in after him. The manga artist doesn’t just say (ページを）持って行った (He ran off with the page); he says (ページを）持って行きやがった (He fucking ran off with the page). (Aside: I feel like “He ran off with the goddamn page” is a smoother alternative, but I wanted to get “fucking” closer to the verb to match the Japanese. Any thoughts? I feel like this would be an acceptable change.)

心配させやがる and やりやがる are interesting cases. These both get used in reference to friends rather than enemies, so the former is almost like “Damn, you had us worried.” The latter I saw in a video game once as a やりやがるな！ I believe it was in a shooter or in a co-op card game, and the phrase was praising the partner’s actions/play. I can’t remember how the translator handled it, but the one thing that comes to mind now is “Fuck yeah!” or “Hell yeah!” It is along the lines of “Nice work!” Most やりやがる phrases will be more similar to the example above and in reference to an unpleasant やるing.

Yahoo provides us with a nota bene after the core definition that further supports the association with fuck/some sort of casual spoken phrase. The phrase has been taken up by dudes:

◆近世以降、男性のぞんざいな調子の会話で用いられる。「…（し）ている」に「やがる」の付いた「…（し）ていやがる」は、「…（し）てやがる」となることがある。また、その前の連用形の末尾の音と融合して、「どこへ行きゃあがった」のように「…ゃあがる」となることもある。

This is another one of those phrases that are good to recognize but should never be used. I don’t trust myself to use these precisely enough to get the intended effect. Maybe a joking やりやがるな every now and then with friends I’m really close with but never in any situation even slightly more formal. It is a very useful phrase to know for game and manga translation, though, so keep your eyeballs peeled.

Passive HUH?

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When I wrote my last post, I never imagined that I would have an opportunity to use やられた so soon. Well, here it goes: 英語の文法用語にやられた！

As I’m sure many of you have noticed, someone rightfully called me out for mistakenly saying “passive tense” instead of “passive voice” in my Japan Times article “Stop worrying and embrace the passive tense.” (Judging from my bit.ly stats, more of you followed the link to the letter to the editor than the actual article!)

In my defense, I do use “passive voice” at times in the article, so I knew there was some sort of difference between voice and tense, but the letter to the editor certaintly cleared it up. I guess before I thought that “tense” meant “verb conjugation,” which the Japanese passive is, but apparently this is not what tense is.

The main point of my article is not diminished by this (minor?) semantics issue: the Japanese passive is awesome, and you best get used to it, son. The sooner you can take off the floaties (it’s been years since I’ve used the floaties metaphor, apparently) and swim in the deep end without any subjects or objects, the sooner you will be doing real, live Japonese.

So please do continue to call me out for my inadequacies…especially if they are English inadequacies. That I can handle. I only take offense when my Japanese is corrected. NOT!

号外 – Oyster Season Closing Poem

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My love of oysters is well chronicled here at How to Japonese. Last year I got a group together near the end of April and we spent over $1000 on oysters! (゜д゜;) This year I won’t even approach that. The group is smaller and the oysters are much, much cheaper. If you’re in New Orleans today, please feel free to drop by Cooter Brown’s from 7pm onward.

To celebrate, I’ve written a poem about the end of oyster season. Enjoy:

‘Twas the first of September and all through the parish
Not a mollusk was stirring in stomachs a’famished.
But when the long hours of toil ended that day,
Eyes brightened, smiles formed, and the people became gay.

With a jump and a shout the crowds took to the bar
To eat them some oysters from near and afar.
“On the halfshell, on crackers, or charbroiled!” they exclaimed.
“In poboys, in gumbos, or Rockefeller!” they said, unashamed.

Through fall and winter and spring they did eat,
And as summer approached, they realized they were beat.
“My belly is full,” a wee lad cried, holding a shell.
“And I’ve been at this smoky bar for so long that I smell!”

“One last night!” someone screamed, “We haven’t drank all the beer.”
“And once April is over, we’ll have to wait till next year.”
“’Tis true!” another echoed, “This is the most important day thus far.”
“Because we can only eat oysters in months that have R.”

From amidst the hordes of oyster eaters there arose a great cheer,
And they all ordered more dozens and refilled their beer.
The hot summer months are no reason to get down.
Let’s celebrate! You’re invited! to end oyster season on April 29 at Cooter Browns!

Cool Passive Phrase – やられた！

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I have an article in The Japan Times today, this time about the passive tense in Japanese. After introducing a couple of phrases that helped me understand how the passive tense works in Japanese, I discuss Murakami’s amazing sentence from his Mediterranean travel diary, which I examined during Murakami-palooza 2008. My translations then and now are slightly different. What do you think? The new one is a bit smoother.

I also talk about the awesome phrase やられた！ as an example. I highly recommend using this exclamatory phrase as frequently as possible. It will earn laughs, especially in situations where you aren’t really that やられたd.

If, however, this happens:

Then you have truly been やられたd. That image is one of the results of a Google Images search for やられた.