Tanilba Bay

I now present to you, my loving audience, Tanilba Bay! We popped up there for a few days to see my parents. It is a beautiful town, about 2.5 hours north of Sydney, or 45 minutes past Newcastle.

Here is a shot taken from the beach, about 2 minute walk from Mum and Dad's place:

Quite nice isn't it?

The weather continues to be kind to us. Only days away from winter and we still managed to get sunny skies and 25 degree days.

We took advantage of the nice weather and took lots of leisurely strolls on the beach and the surrounds. The photo of the pelican (or penguin as Julie kept accidentally calling it) on the right was taken in Lemon Tree Passage, another small town about 5 minute drive from Tanilba Bay. It has all manner of water life just waiting to fly away the moment I came close enough to take a decent photo... *sigh*

You can see the rest of the photos on my Flickr photostream of Tanilba Bay photos.

We are back in Sydney now and fly out for Tokyo tomorrow (Saturday). The Japan leg of our trip is about to commence!

Mmmmm... BBQ!

Looks cozy doesn't it? That's everyone from Julie's family tucking into a delicious BBQ. We touched down for the Australian leg of our tour on Sunday morning and promptly had a family BBQ on the same day.

We had a yummy assortment of Australian BBQ staples, such as steak, sausages, potato salad, coleslaw, chicken kebabs and salad. Immediately followed by mud cake! I'm hungry again just thinking about it... Might have to get stuck into some of the leftovers.

Even though it is only a week away from winter here in Sydney, the weather has been very nice. About 25 degrees Celsius and sunny nice, in fact.

The next stop will be my parent's house in Tanilba Bay. Should get a chance to get some bird photography done. Although I will miss having a 300mm lens at that point - yes Kate, a higher level zoom is always nice! You will have to pry the L lens from my cold dead fingers though :)

More posts forthcoming!

Why Fuji-san?

One thing that confused me for a while was why Mount Fuji was often written or spoken as Fuji-san.

The first confusing part is that in Japanese, the word "san" is attached as a suffix to names. It roughly translates to Mr/Mrs/Miss in English, but its usage is significantly broader. So Mr Tanaka is Tanaka-san. Easy enough. But Fuji-san isn't that sort of san... Oh no, nothing that simple.

To understand why, you need to understand the kanji that is used to write Mt Fuji in Japanese. It is written as "富士山" which uses the kanji for "Fuji" and "mountain". So far so good. Now kanji usually have a single meaning, but several ways of reading them (more on kunyomi and onyomi another time.) As a rule, "山" by itself is read as "yama". So in the sentence "that mountain is tall isn't it?", you would read it literally as "ano yama wa, se ga takai desu ne" or "あの山は、背が高いですね".

However another way of reading the kanji "山" is as "san". Aha, it is all falling into place! As you would might have guessed, that's the correct way of reading "富士山".

So what can you take away from all this, apart from a slight headache?

If you want to refer to Mt Fuji in English, go wild with Mt Fuji, since it is a safe bet. If you want to use the Japanese version, use Fuji-san. You might even come off sounding all worldly. Or you might not...

As a word of caution, don't use Fuji-yama! It is just plain wrong and will earn you naught but scorn and derision from all who know you.

The Plan!

So we are off on the 23rd for our trip. First stop is Australia for a week. No sightseeing during that time, just lots of quality time with family. Might try and refresh my Australian accent since I'm not really comfortable with this English accent I seem to be acquiring. I say!

On the 31st we fly on to Tokyo, where will be spending the first 4 days. We will be off to Fuji-san (no, not all the way up, still too cold for that), a walking tour of Kamakura and best of all (for me!) will be Akihabara. A Mecca for geeks to congregate and purchase things they should never rightfully need.

We then fly north, all the way up to Sapporo where we will spend another 4 days, travelling around Hokkaido. This will include Sapporo, Noboribetsu (hot springs!), Lake Toya and Hakodate.

Travelling south by train, we will be staying in a string of cities; Hirosaki, Matsushima, Yamagata and Nikko before finally arriving back to Tokyo for our flight home.

My only fear is that I've packed in too much travel for just 2 weeks. But it just wouldn't be me if I didn't overdo it at least a little :)

Writing Japanese 101

I thought it would be fun to impart a little bit of knowledge with everyone on the Japanese writing system. I'll try and keep it short and amusing, so bear with me a little here.

Japanese has 3 primary writing systems, 4 if you count the use of English characters. Let's not and just say we did though.

So, first up we have hiragana, an alphabet of some 46 characters (not including compounds) used to represent sounds. This system is used initially by children to write all words. However as they progress through school, most of the hiragana is replace by kanji, leaving it to be used to write particles, modify verbs and other specific situations. The well known "konnichiwa" (good day/hello) is written entirely in hiragana - こんにちは.

The second of these systems is katakana. Similar hiragana it is a defined alphabet with 46 base characters. This is used to write all words of foreign origin. Can you guess what the English word behind クリスマス (Kurisumasu), ウイスキー(uisukii) and テレビ (terebi) are? Katakana is also used to write telegrams, cause you know we use those all the time these days, and in advertising to spice things up.

Finally we arrive at kanji, the vast array of complicated symbols that were imported from China (thanks a bunch guys!) at around 57 AD. Kanji represent meaning rather than a single set sound. This means that each kanji may represent anything from a single syllable to a whole word, or both depending on the circumstances. There are tens of thousands of kanji in existence, however you need only know 1945 of them to be able to read a newspaper.

I've been learning Japanese twice a week for about 18 months now and I've picked up about 300 of the little suckers. 300 of the easy ones. And I've probably forgotten half of them at any given time. Not my favourite aspect of Japanese I admit.

One of the kanji I recently learnt is quite amusing - 議 - which is pronounced "gi" or "ぎ" when written in hiragana. About 20 individual strokes make up that character, all for a single syllable. Inconceivable!

もう一度！

I've been to Japan once before for work when I was with HP. It was about 6 years ago and I knew almost no Japanese at all. Even linguistically handicapped as I was, still managed to have a fantastic time while I was there. While there, I also found the rumoured Japanese politeness to be no myth. Overall it was quite a cultural shock for me when compared to Australia and took me quite some time to get used to everything.

That said, I was also with about 8 other Australian and NZers, all roughly the same age (20-somethings) and all from HP. At least half of us are 6 foot or taller and we tended to congregate a fair bit. As you can imagine this went down an absolute storm with the locals. Loud, check, large, check, boisterous, check check check!

Hopefully I'll be able to mortify a significantly lower percentage of the population this time.

No promises though.

What's in a Name?

A quick one this time - why is this blog called Japansei?

Well it is a (not very clever) play on words. Obviously the Japan part means... well, Japan. The word "sei" is a suffix applied in Japanese to mean "made in". So something made in Japan would be 日本製 (nihonsei) where 日本 (nihon) means "Japan" and 製 is the kanji for "sei" or "made in". Linguistic fun for everyone!

もうすぐ行きます！

I've decided to start this blog to cover my adventures in Japan. We are leaving (on a jet plane) on the 23rd of May. In preparation for the trip, I'll post a few of my thoughts on Japan here.

Most people who know me well have a reasonable idea of the extent of my fascination with Japan. Couple this with learning Japanese and I often get asked what drives me to go for all that effort. The answer is fairly emotive and isn't easily explained...

I'll give it a shot anyway.

To me, a fairly logical and technically minded guy, the Japanese and their culture represent a fascinating mix of structure, freedom, repression and inhibition. I do so love a challenge!

If you were to take interpersonal interactions in Japanese society as an example, it can be viewed as a multivariate hierarchy, a many to many relationship. It isn't a simple matter of showing deference to those older than you, it takes into account family, occupation, position, status and a myriad of other factors. That said, it is all quite logical and just trying to comprehend the many rules and norms presents a wonderful challenge.

With this image of a heavy structured society with a minefield of social norms, you would be forgiven for thinking that it would all be a bit boring and rigid. The truth is far from it however. As the see-saw swings one way (structure), as does the balance shift for the other end (chaos). Japan's cultural output acts conduit for expression, producing a massive variety of unbound expressions. For me, Japanese animation, or anime, is the form of this outlet that I enjoy the most. The stories range from the predictable childish (happily ever after!) through to wonderfully open ended and fantastic. Above all, it is this variety and unpredictability that attracts me to Japan.