One thing that I never expected to be surprised by before coming here was the amount of injuries Japanese school students have. They spend so much time at club activities so they get a lot of injuries. For example I know the seniors in the tennis club spend five hours a day after school five times a week and more on weekends playing tennis, in the freezing cold, when it’s raining. I’m assuming the baseball club would be even more hardcore than that. So after noticing everyone’s giant bruises and cuts and slings I started thinking whether I’d eventually get hurt and have a big bruise to sport. Well it happened, it happened at my flower arranging club. Yes, I joined the flower arranging club. I was about to cut the stem of one flower and I missed the stem in one moment of complete uncoordination and cut my finger in a really bad way. Now my finger is bruised and cut but it means that I’m one step closer to being a Japanese schoolboy so I’m happy about it.
You’re probably all wondering why I joined the flower arranging club and so am I! Nodding and smiliing only helps so much until you agree to something you really don’t want to do. The next day someone I had never met before came and escorted me to the flower arranging room and there it began, but I won’t quit because at least it gives me a chance to make more friends.

I am slowly reconstructing everybody’s impression of foreigners and I think they’re getting used to me. The fact that I’m not American, blonde, sporty, or Avril Lavigne has pretty much shocked my entire school, let alone me the only male joining the flower arranging club. I never realized how different Australia is to most countries in that I grew up around so many different cultures. Japan is a completely homogenous society so something foreign causes a lot of interest and a lot of hassle. Everybody is so compatible in Japan, nobody breaks the rules or ruins the order of things, everybody does what they’re supposed to do without complaining or fighting. That’s the positive effect of having a society very closed to the outside world even though that’s changing fast. It’s nice to be in a country where everything works out perfectly as planned, but if anything other than the over-politeness could get on my nerves it’ll be the fact that everything is too clockwork.

Anyway I’ll talk a bit about some things I still can’t get over at school.
The girls dominate. A Japanese classroom would be a feminist’s haven. I’ve seen guys crying because their girlfriend’s beat them up. The girls here are so violent, and their boyfriend’s try to fight back but the combined power of the girl’s shrieking and unrestrained punches and kicking could K.O anyone. Even the seemingly most timid girl has released a brutal punch when she sees appropriate. Apart from that the girl’s also have a strange perception of vanity. They put on their fake eyelashes and make-up in the middle of class where everyone can see and it’s obvious they don’t beautify themselves to impress the guys, I think they do it just for fun and just because they can. The girls are the ones who talk to the boys at lunch not the other way around, and it’s the girls who talk back to the teachers and get a smile in return, not the boys. The girls are more free than the guys at school, they can join soccer, baseball or any sport they want as well as all the cultural clubs while there are no guys in the tea ceremony or flower arranging clubs (except me). Between now and twenty years in the future these girls will lose everything interesting about them. Judging from the majority of middle aged women in Japan, girls grow up to be polite, well-behaved and positively feminine, lacking an opinion on anything and only caring about their children going to school and what their husband’s eat. Sure they’re very kind and motherly but that’s all there is to them. Apparently they lose any hope of a fashion sense. Perhaps it’s just a major change in generations but whatever it is it creeps me out. The elderly women seem to be a lot like elderly people in Australia actually and I see them as more familiar than most other people.

The guys in my class are a bit boring but they probably think I’m very boring too. They only talk about sport (from what I can understand), and they only play cards at school or sleep, waiting for baseball to start. Most guys are too scared to even make eye contact with me and most of the guys who I’m friends with only first starting talking to me because they were dared by their friends. That’s not entirely true actually, there are some from the third year who realize that I’m just human and there’s some other guys who don’t know what to think of me after seeing me not performing well in our PE activities. It’s only men in Japan who have work twitches and it seems to be almost every man. I don’t know what in the world could make them want to overwork to the point that they their eyes are constantly twitching.

Cherry Blossoms

Well the cherry blossoms have finally arrived in Hokkaido, a month and a half after the rest of Japan. Obihiro has almost completely transformed, trees are growing leaves, grass is actually green, and I finally saw the sun. The amount of pink everywhere is a bit overwhelming, even when I first arrived I was a bit shocked at how many posters, paintings or billboards of cherry blossoms there were. They are beautiful but sometimes I feel that they’re overrated – just a little bit… They only last for three weeks of the whole year and the Japanese make it sound like they only grow in Japan and all year round. Nonetheless the blossom season, wherever you are in Japan and whatever month it arrives, is definitely something to look forward to. I don’t know if it’s me just being stupid but I swear that a city smells different when there’s green growing on trees. I could almost feel the first day of spring when I woke up; the clouds were sparse and there were birds chirping instead of cawing. The ravens in Japan are positively weird. They sound like a human impersonating a crow, it’s so strange to listen to them. Sometimes when I’m riding home from school I hear a crow and almost fall off my bike, they’re like someone very funny is trying to be funny by scaring me impersonating a crow. It’s hard to explain.

Anyway, the sakura have definitely changed what I thought earlier about Obihiro being the ugliest city in existence but they still don’t hide the cracked road and collapsing houses. After finally finding my bearings in Obihiro I’ve come to realize that the suburb I live in is filled with factories, panel-beaters and hermit women with glad-wrap for windows. I almost yelped when I first saw my neighbour the other day, she looked like garlic, completely wrinkled and hunched like a mangled stick wearing medieval peasant clothes. It seems she was in hibernation over the winter and now only comes out of her shack to tend to her vegetable patch. I had always thought her house was my family’s garden shed, it has newspaper and glad-wrap for windows, a frontdoor that’s almost fallen off it’s hinges and a roof that’s completely curved from the weight of snow. I’m really curious as to what she does all day and what kind of life she has/had.

Apart from her I’ve met a lot of strange people who seem a lot more interesting than the strange people in Australia. The other day I went to an ostrich farm, which is strange in itself. The owner of the ostrich farm wears an ostrich feather in his hat and yellow and red striped suspenders. He has a hobby of collecting enormous dinosaur statues which make the ostrich farm appear even more “unique”. There were colourful turkeys running around the legs of a huge tyranosaurus rex who is as big as the biggest building in Obihiro; goats chained to the ground in the middle of the entrance to the park; and least of all, one of those bull-riding machines that you see in cowboy movies. Me and my friend were confused, first of all at why the heck there was an ostrich farm in Hokkaido and second of all why the ostrich farm was more of a bizarre collector’s display than an ostrich farm.

 Golden Week has just finished here which officially begins Spring (and apparently happiness) in Hokkaido. I’m already starting to miss the snow as I still hadn’t really gotten over it after I arrived. As much as I love the sun and warmth and green, I’m already looking forward to October when it starts snowing again. Golden Week holds a lot of festivities, I think there’s four national public holidays in the same week which makes it very significant for every Japanese family. Yesterday was Children’s Day and I went to see the famous koinobori which are hundreds of carp flags hung up high across a river in a town near Obihiro called Taiki. The same is done all over Japan and I’m hoping that what I saw in Taiki isn’t the best of it. I was given the impression that it’s a marvellous display, instead it was old and faded carp over a pretty ugly river with banks of gravel. I wasn’t really impressed but it seems that the throngs of Japanese families around me were. It must bring back a lot of fond memories for the older people and it must be very exciting for the children whom the day was created for.

That’s all I have to say today. One more thing, even though Japanese adore cute and cuddly things more than any other country in the world – they treat their pets terribly and that’s pretty much my only serious complaint after being here for six weeks.