I snort as I snap awake, the cold, early morning air biting my face. I look around me, blinking sleep out of my eyes. I have no idea how long I was passed out for. Endless hordes of what can only be described as nerds are all around me, sitting on tiny stools and wrapped up in winter clothes, their noses in books. It’s late December, and it’s not even 7AM yet. I look to my friends, hunched over their Nintendo DS’s. I then glance up at the massive, iconic building before me; Tokyo Big Site, the home of the legendary Comic Market: the veritable Mecca of otaku.

A tiny part of the lineup. We sat here for HOURS and watched the sun come up…

HI UBC BLOGS.

I AM ALIVE.

You will not believe what I have been through in the last few months. Real talk, some of it’s actually been pretty serious and I haven’t quite told UBC what happened yet, so I figured I’d hop back on the blog and catch up and slowly unravel my tale, since it’s no fun doing what the Japanese like to call neta bare, also known as spoiling the story line! I may as well make it interesting, eh? I deeply apologize that I have taken literal months to update, things got kind of nuts from the end of December and it didn’t all calm down until this month (my goodness where did 2017 go?).

Let’s go back to December.

The massive tome in my arms is the size of a telephone book and is filled to the brim with tiny panels showcasing each circle offering their works for sale. For when we finally get into the building anyway.

Twice a year, Tokyo Big Site (a large international conference building) plays host to a giant event known as Comic Market, aka Comiket. Hundreds of thousands of people will ride the first train of the morning and line up just for a chance to get into the building, where tens of thousands of groups that make comics and fan fiction, called circles, will sell their latest works to the public.  Along with amateur artists, pros will also sell their works at tables that are lined up through massive halls, all lettered and numbered in an order that takes at least a week to learn and understand (at least that’s how long it took me to figure out how to navigate the place!). Unlike anime conventions back home, where many different forms of media will typically be sold, artists generally only sell dojinshi, also called fanzines. These are slim, often exclusive works drawn and penciled by fans of official media, often making up their own story lines and scenarios for their favourite characters. On the other side of the massive building, there will also be an area for official anime and manga companies to set up their own booths and sell exclusive merchandise.

Comiket is run over the course of three days: always a Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Comiket 91, which we attended, was held on the last three days of the year, as is common for the event when held in winter. Day 1, we lined up for seven hours to be able to make it inside the merchandise area, all for my friend to be able to get her hands on exclusive keychains and similar goods that one would not be able to find elsewhere. I also managed to purchase an exclusive clear file with Revy from Black Lagoon, an anime series that I enjoyed as a teenager. There were so many people that we had to be herded around like packs of hungry dogs, all eager to be able to get into the large, packed halls full of people all lining up to buy those fanzines and goods that they’ve been waiting months to get their hands on.

Day 2 was all about the books that we wanted, especially because it is notorious for women-only circles, who tend to specialize in a genre known as ‘Boy’s Love’ (BL). These are stories where main male characters will be paired with each other in romantic and often exaggerated stories, regardless of their sexual orientation in the original works they’re from. I was lucky enough to attend when Yuri on Ice!! had just come out, an anime series that featured overly pretty male figure skaters with massive homo-romantic overtones. I have never seen so many illustrations of half-naked men covered in glitter in my life.

It was beautiful.

Me running around in pure happiness, Tokyo Big Site looking majestic as heck beside my penguin-like body.

One thing that Comiket is also known for is the cosplay scene, which tends to explode here. Cosplaying in public is generally frowned upon here (I will post more on this later), so any chance for the locals to come out and strut their stuff is greatly appreciated. Not to diss Vancouver, but damn, Tokyo’s cosplay community is insane! There’s less pressure here on cosplayers to make their own outfits and look, so people tend to purchase more components of their costuming, and as a result, they end up looking pretty darn legit. I saw some amazing stuff, and many of the nerds that had lined up for hours made a beeline for the cosplay-designated area once we were cut loose, high-resolution cameras in hand.

All in all, Comiket 91 was a raging success, after weeks of planning with friends and coming up with buying strategies, as well as how best to line up. I feel as though I have passed some sort of initiation rite, and become an otaku myself, aka a crazed fan, albeit specifically for comics. It was most definitely worth all of the suffering, and I even specifically booked my flight back to Canada to be AFTER Comiket 92, because I have to go back. I even applied for my own table so that I could express my own artistic love of comics… but more on that later… 😉

I’m standing in Japan Post Bank, people waiting in rows of seats behind me, clutching file folders full of paperwork. I’m waiting at the registration counter, having already spent the last half hour working on trying to open a bank account. The banker, a young Japanese woman, comes rushing back, handing me back the form I just filled out. 

<I’m sorry… please… write your name again, all capital letters…>

I sigh. This may take awhile. 

It’s been a few weeks since I arrived in Tokyo. It’s been a whirlwind of paperwork, settling into my dorm, and starting school.

Oh, and giant Gundams.

I’m living in Fujimidai, which is located in Nerima Ward in Northwestern Tokyo. It is a glorious town, complete with excellent access to the Tokyo Metro (very close to the bustling area of Ikebukuro), Shakuji-koen, the second largest park across Tokyo, second only to Ueno, and it only takes 45 minutes to reach Sophia University, that gorgeous centre of knowledge, nestled in the middle of Yotsuya Ward, which also plays home to the Japanese Diet Building and the very controversial Yasukuni Shrine!

A friend of mine (right) and I posing with the Fujimidai sign at our train stop. The name roughly translates to ‘place from which one can see Fuji’.

First of all, I have got to mention the stuff I had to go through before classes finally started, not to mention the reason it took me awhile to finish this post!! Japan is notoriously famous for their efforts to find illegal workers, the two most prolific being police asking foreigners to see their passports (not carrying it with you results in a fine), and the fingerprinting and mugshot process you go through when entering the country. Now, since we as students are staying longer than the typical tourist visa, we are issued resident cards to avoid the inconvenience of having to constantly carry our passports around. While this is nice, we also have to go register our addresses at our local ward office within 14 days of landing.

Now, I speak pretty decent Japanese, especially after UBC’s grueling Intensive Intermediate Japanese courses, which I took last year. Thanks to that, I was more than capable of filling out all of the paperwork at the aforementioned ward office. I had to write out a form notifying them where I live, as well as do this whole other process to get national health insurance, and get a certificate to prove that I did all of this for Sophia. Halfway through the process, I realized something striking: there was absolutely no other language support. Being in Japan, this wouldn’t be a surprise, but one look around my dorm will tell you that a lot of students that come over here can barely string a sentence together, because they’re either beginners or low-intermediate speakers at most. I immediately realized how much I took my skill for granted, because most people had to bring a friend or a helper along to do that paperwork, as well as open a bank account, get a phone sim card, or fill in applications at school.

Once that was all dealt with, it was time to take my Japanese Language Placement Test at Sophia. I was amazed, again, just how prepared I was for it, thanks to UBC. The intensive program in Vancouver was really difficult, mostly due to its fast pace. We went through the entirety of An Integrated Approach to Intermediate Japanese in a year, which is no easy feat. The good news is, Sophia’s Japanese language program has a course that immediately follows that textbook, and I totally got in. Because I am obviously amazing. I could not believe how close the classes were, it pretty much picked up exactly where the last one left off. So for the last couple weeks, I have been taking Intensive Japanese, which is a double-credit course that is three hours every freakin’ morning. We have quizzes every morning, a presentation, a unit test, and a written composition every week.

Maybe this is why I get called a masochist?

This is me pawing at a sign of my favourite restaurant’s food, a simple dish called doria, which is a bowl of rice topped with pasta sauce, meat, and melted cheese.

My other classes are very nice, I am taking a literature course all about Modern Japanese Fiction, and an Anthropology course about modern and post-modern theory, which is actually taught by a Canadian professor who is visiting this year! He is literally the only other Canadian person that I have met on this whole trip so far. Everybody else that I have met have been students from all across Europe, Pakistan, Indonesia, other parts of Asia, and the United States. When I take the train, I stick out like a sore thumb that has gotten infected and probably needs to be amputated. As a result, I have been stared at a lot, and the usual profiling that I expected has indeed occurred. If I speak Japanese to people, I often get answers in broken English, even though I am speaking in full sentences, and I have already been turned away from a gym because of my tattoos (because I totally look like a yakuza gangster, right?). Worst yet, some of my friends have been turned away from restaurants for being foreigners. I am doing my best to ‘read the air’, as they say in Japanese, which essentially means to read the mood around you and act appropriately, because I am horribly aware of the stereotype that has been slapped onto foreigners (‘gaikokujin‘), and it’ll take a lot for those labels to start going away.

Not like it really matters though, I love Tokyo and I have otherwise gotten right back into the swing of things here! I can navigate the transit, I am way more functional in the language than I expected, and oh my god all of the food. It doesn’t matter if it comes from a convenience store or a full restaurant, it is just all great. My school’s cafeteria has everything from pork cutlet rice bowls to Japanese noodle soup, and it’s all much cheaper than Vancouver. Every weekend, I am making an effort to go for nice walks in the local parks (one of which is chock-full of rare birds!) and exploring different areas, like Shibuya and Odaiba, which is the place with the really, really big Gundam.

Tomorrow, I will venture out to Saitama, a town to the north of Tokyo, which has one of the oldest temples in Japan. From there, who knows what could be next? I definitely want to check out Kamakura, Osaka, Hokkaido… sky’s the limit, really! ‘Til then, I big thee adieu, and until next time, reader!

I’m sitting in a pub in the beating heart of The South. College football is playing loudly on the televisions over the bar as the server frantically serves drinks and food. I get my delicious burger and start to dig in, but I cannot help but pause to take notes, as the football fans in the room are roaring at another touchdown and dancing and cheering in ways that I have never seen sports fans do. The anthropologist in me needs to take notes. A cranky older man taps me on the shoulder, looking absolutely scandalized. 

“Let me ask you somethin’,” he says, his southern accent making him nigh incomprehensible to my northern ears. “Y’all came down here to enjoy a nice beer, good food, and friends, right? So why in the hell are you writin’?!”

I smile and almost feel a little sad for this man who believes that writing could not possibly be fun. My friends snigger and continue working on their drinks, amused that the Canadian has managed to garner further attention for her weirdness.

I excel at confusing people. I think it’s gotten to the point that they get so mixed up with what my plans are that they just ignore it until I update my Facebook profile to let them know I’m not dead.

Phase 1 of my very indirect route has been completed, reader. I have this friend, y’see, that has been my pen pal since I was twelve years-old. Well, several months ago, she invited me to be a bridesmaid at her wedding. She lives all the way in South Carolina. I really wanted to be there, but her wedding is five days before I am supposed to be in Tokyo. So I had to figure out a way to get there and back again.

Kyiv Pasazhyrs’kyi (Київ-Пасажирський), aka Central Railway Station.

So to start, I was in Athens, Greece. I flew out on a nice sunny afternoon from El. Venizelos Airport (ATH) to Borispol International (KBP), which is located just outside of Kyiv, Ukraine. Why the heck did I go to Ukraine, of all places? Well, Ukraine International Airlines recently started a very reasonably priced flight from Kyiv to JFK Airport, in New York. From there, it was just a small hop to get down to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina! As a bonus, I was able to enjoy Kyiv for an evening, as I had an 18 hour layover there! But after eating pierogies and borscht and meeting some amazing people at one of the local hostels, it was time to move on.

The flight was amazingly smooth, barely any turbulence, and even though it was ten hours long, it seemed to go by in an instant. Before I knew it, I was landing in New York. I had to switch to LaGuardia Airport (LGA) for my next flight, so I had pre-ordered a ticket for a shuttle bus (NYC Airporter), which was fantastic because it meant I would get to skip the agony of backpacking through the metro during rush hour. It even had wifi onboard.

Unbeknownst to me, Hurricane Hermine had decided to crash into the east coast earlier that day, killing two people and spraying debris and chaos all over. It hit fast and was downgraded to a tropical storm, but it meant that the flight preceding mine had been diverted to another place, so they took a very long time to get back. The flight ended up being delayed by close to an hour, which given the circumstances was very impressive. However, other flights had also experienced hiccups, and LaGuardia had a lot of construction going on. So we ended up taxiing on the tarmac for an additional hour, watching the sunset from our little windows.

By the time I finally made it to Myrtle, my poor friend and her fiance had been waiting for me, having driven three hours in a tropical storm to pick me up. I’ve never been more grateful.

A menu in an ‘Asian/Mexican’ fusion restaurant, clearly displaying Inuit art over an image of Mt. Fuji. I couldn’t make this up if I tried.

Out of any country in the world that I have visited thus far, I never feel more like a fish out of water than I do in the United States. Perhaps it’s the fact that performative patriotism is strongly encouraged, so there is much evidence to support the suggestion that Americans feel the need to assert their identity, i.e. flags on everything, signs on businesses claiming to be ‘American’, etc. It’s everywhere down here, and if you are not American, like myself, then you feel a little out of place. I can’t help but keep notes on everything that happens while I’m here, because people are very outspoken and even though we’re only a few hours away by plane, the US and Canada are vastly different.

It is also good training for my upcoming year in Japan. Sometimes I seem to get a swelled head and think I know how something is going to go down in a cultural setting, and then I am surprised when it goes differently. I have to remember to basically stop being a know-it-all and go with the flow, as I suggested in my last post. It will hinder my capacity to learn if I don’t. So I’m grateful that my friend chose now to get married, and gave me an excuse to enact my ‘indirectness’ resolution to be able to take such a crazy path leading up to Tokyo. It’s helping me grow as a person and preparing me for many more surprises.

I’ll be here for the next week, then I’m off. Of course, I can’t fly directly to Tokyo from Myrtle Beach. Tune in next time to see how Phase 2 works out. Hopefully this time with a little less hurricane!