Lets see where to start.  You know I'm kind of settling into Japan
enough, that it seems like nothing really remarkable happens in my
daily life anymore, so I never know quite what to say, which is
probably why I keep putting off sending an e-mail.  My Japanese has
been improving a lot recently, although I've decided I need to learn
way more words, because I'm able to express pretty complex sentences
gramatically, but the number of words I have to use is very limited,
especially in a conversation, when I have to sit and think of the word
I need.  But I have been getting much better at more conversational
Japanese recently, mainly because I've been able to have some longer
conversations and I realized that I talk like a wuss girl from the
Kanto area,  or what is known as One (big sister), slang for a
feminine guy.  So I've been working on learning how to sound tougher.
Part of this is because both my teachers are women, so I learn from
copying their speech and partly because all books and ways of learning
Japanese are based on the Kanto area, which here, sounds stupid.  An
example is what I first learned for what did you do last light is,
Kinou wa nani o shimashitaka.  Very formal.  So now I learned how to
speak more conversational, Kinou nani o shita, but in this area people
might say, Kinou nani shiotta.  Or many sentences in Japanese end in
desu, the verb to be, and you can add enders, ne (inviting the person
to speak), yo (expressing belief in your expression or insistence).
So in this area the version of desuyo can be daro or you can just drop
desu and say yo.  So I'm slowly learning these things and it makes
things a little easier.

So enough on the vexations of the Japanese language.  What I have I
been doing?  Well I went hiking yet again.  Right now in Japan is the
horrible summertime.  It's hot, it's humid, at night it's still hot
and humid.  It rains every other day or so and sometimes it pours
hard.  So this time I went hiking to a little pond and went swimming
as a way to beat the heat.  If you look at the attached picture that's
me jumping into the pond from a little cliff on the side.  Now the
interesting part of this excursion was the Japanese kid we (me and my
roommate) met when we were out there.  He was out collecting beatles,
which can be sold to little kids, who keep them as pets.  I know its
pretty strange, but a lot of my older students remember looking for
beatles and keeping them at home as their summertime activity.  In
addition some of them would catch river eels for their parents to
cook.   So anyway, this guy was looking for beatles and stopped to ask
us what we were doing.  We said swimming and he stripped down to his
boxers and just jumped in.  Then we told him we were gonna jump from
the kill and he got out ran up and did it before us.  He was pretty
adventurious, because we hadn't checked to see if it was safe to jump
yet.

I've also been to the beach a couple of times.  Suma beach is the
closest, but it is so dirty and nasty, its disgusting.  Girls and guys
go there pretty much just to tan and hook up, and people leave garbage
all over the beach, it's frustrating and gross.  But watching Japanese
guys try to court Japanese girls is really entertaining.  So I watched
maybe three groups of guys try to pick up one group of about 6 girls.
One group just went up and said what are you doing and started trying
to talk to them, but the girls all just got up and started playing.  A
definate no.  Another group just tried to play near them and yell and
laugh and pretend to be having a lot of fun and of course look at the
girls to see if they were watching.  And another group did the same
and then sat down next to the girls.  This was the group that won.  On
the beach also, I watched some kids play, they were so funny.  They
moved like they were straight from cartoons.  They played baseball and
when they got a good hit, they wood rest there arms on their hips and
do the evil victory "HA HA HA" laugh.  But the funniest part was that
they were both wearing tight, I mean skintight swimsuits and white
socks pulled up all the way and thats it no shoes.  And they were
dressed that way the entire time they were on the beach, even when
they were swimming, so their socks were just caked in sand.  It was
pathetically hillarious.

And I went to the strangest show I've ever been to in my life.  This
was a band called Ruins, in addition to about 4 or 5 other bands all
with a variety of names, but it was the same 4 people the whole time.
It is headed by a crazy drummer thats been playing music
professionally since about 1984.  The show started with him playing
drums alone to a machine with beats and strange sounds programmed into
it.  It was completely spastic and the drummer played fast and crazy
over the top of it for about 20 minutes and he also sang in an
entirely made up language.  Then two other guys came out with a lute
and a flute and played a cover of Zeppelin's Been a long time, but in
a strange way, they only played the duh duh duh duh part and sang not
quite the words but words that sounded like them, then did flute and
lute solos and back to that part.  After that the drummer came back
out and the lute player left and they started to play random
commercial products, starting with bottles, one blowing into a set of
5 and one playing it like a drum.  While doing this they sand Pet
bottle (pet bottle is the name in japanese for recyclable plastic
bottles) pet the bottle.  Then they pulled out scissors and attached
sensitive mics to them and cut, using pedals to make them sound crazy,
singing cut, scissor, etc.  Then they played a guitar solo over it and
the drummer pulled out a camera and played the wind and shutter.
zree-shu-shu.  After that they played zippers saying zipper fastener.
Then the lute player came out with no instrument and they did an
acapella jam for about 15 minutes starting with like a doo-wop kinda
thing and chanting, then finally singing really crazy all differently.
 It was bizzare.  After that the drummer played with this girl for a
long time, maybe forty minutes, who was a fantastic keyboard player
and they played more music that can only be described as completely
spastic.  It was like fast and intense and crazy, then suddendly soft
and beautiful, followed by completely dirchordant and bizzarre.  The
girl had a great voice too.  Before she stopped they played a song
which I can only describe as a tribute to the 30 or 40 songs everyone
in the world knows, but they played each one only long enough for you
to recognize it and then changed.  Then the other guys came out and
played bass, guitar, flute, and electric violin, using loop pedals to
play everything and following the drummer, but playing really
improvisational.  It was just insane.  And the keyboard player joined
them again.  The entire show was over 3 hours, and the drummer played
the whole time, except during the lute, flute song.  He was completely
drenched in sweat.  It was insanity and still I have no way to really
describe what it sounded like.  But it was really entertaining.  I
burst into uncontrollable laughter, rocked out, couldn't figure out
what was happening, and was entirely annoyed at times.  But it was
good.

That's all for now.  Oh yeah, I might start playing music at a bar
about once a month soon with this American dude.  So I'm really
looking forward to that.

Dan