This video explains what is going on in Japan to Japanese kids. Like my friend Wilhelm wrote: “Apparently the power plant really needs to go to the bathroom and makes people uneasy with its flatulence. A diaper will however solve the problem.”

Since the western media still is overfeeding us with all kinds of articles about radiation and power plants, I wanted to share a couple of articles that I found a bit different and interesting. I have no idea if these have been floating all over the internet or not already since I was a week in China, but they are great reads.

• The Last Foreigner in Japan. This is an interesting article about all the ex-pats who are leaving Japan, and how the author who is staying behind feels about it. In the comment section below the article there was a great remark: “For me there have always been two kinds of expats — there are those who come to live in Japan and those who merely come as tourists. Some of those tourists actually stick it out for twenty years without ever really living here.”
• Uniqlo Donates $25.6 Million To Japanese Red Cross. Reading this article made me really happy. Uniqlo makes a great donation, and even more impressive than that: CEO Tadashi Yanai will make a personal donation of 1 billion yen.
• Japan’s infamous mafia (Yakuza) are helping out with the relief efforts. Say what you want about the yakuza, it shows that everyone has good in them. A member quotes: “There are no yakuza or katagi (ordinary citizens) or gaijin (foreigners) in Japan right now. We are all Japanese. We all need to help each other.”

Please keep in mind that the true tragedy are all the tsunami and earthquake victims. Do whatever you can to help them. Donate money. Send stuff. Do something. I will go out tomorrow and buy supplies and ship it up north. ♥

Got back to Tokyo last night, and it felt good to be in a country with calm people and a reliable internet-connection. (China was niiice as well though, don’t get me wrong!) However, just in the first four hours of being home there was six earthquakes (probably aftershocks). I assume it is Japan’s way of saying welcome home. No major quakes. Today has been spent doing laundry and other housewife-like things and then going shopping for food. The supermarkets have almost completely restocked everything (apart from cup noodles) and there was no long lines anymore. I have tons of pictures from Shanghai to look through. Hope everyone else is well, I haven’t checked anyone’s blogs because bloglovin was blocked in China. Anyway – good to be home!

Good news:

• We are in Shanghai. The lineup at Narita airport in Japan was crazy, but everyone is really good at standing in line.
• The hotel room is absolutely gorgeous and extravagant, and I think it is the nicest hotel room I have ever stayed in. (Pictures to follow.)
• There is complimentary internet, and I have access to both my email and my webpage.

Bad news:

• A lot of the webpages I frequent are blocked. Facebook, youtube, twitter, bloglovin, blogspot… So surfing the internet is kind of a limited experience.
• I am trying to think that I am on holiday and all is fine and dandy, but I feel such sadness in my heart for the poor people in Japan who are affected by the recent affairs. I very rarely cry over a country, but I my heart feels heavy for Japan.

I think we all need a break if we can manage to have one though, and I am lucky enough to get such a break right now. So I will try to enjoy my week in Shanghai. (Before I return to Tokyo.) Now that I know my computer is working from here, I can even blog. However, if you are friends with me on facebook (or any other place) I am not sure I will bother trying to access the pages by proxy. Maybe living facebook-free for a week will be a nice experience. I am available through sushibird.com and also via email for the ones who know me.

In general terms though, and I am very sorry if I offend any Chinese people (or China-loving people) that might read this, but I really do not think China is my cup of tea the same way that Japan is. That being said, I have only been here for a day. And that being said, I have other friends who LOVE China and have minimal interest in Japan, so I guess the taste differs a lot from person to person. I am not trying to say China is not nice, because it is, it is just very different than what I am used to. I know that people who are not that interested in Asia think that all East Asian countries are similar, but oh my god, the differences! (For me it would be to compare say… Norway and Spain?) I will make a separate post about the differences between Japan and China when I have actually been here a bit longer. So far, people here are kind of loud and have no sense of the 30 cm of personal space I am used to, and they stare. I thought I was not going to be stared at having dark hair at all, but I guess the foreigner-factor still counts for me, despite my dair hair.

But all is well and dandy in Lala-land, and now I am going out to take some pictures and eat some food and try to forget about the rest of the world.

I haven’t mentioned this on the blog yet, because I was a bit preoccupied with the earthquake and the crisis Japan is in at the moment (plus, I needed to get my visa), but I am leaving for China tomorrow. I am not leaving because I am trying to escape from Japan, this trip has been planned for a long time way before the earthquake hit. It is a one week vacation to Shanghai. I think I have figured out how to get to Narita airport with the train situation being the way it is. So – I might not be able to update the blog for the next week since I will be in Shanghai, and I have no idea what webpages might be blocked in China. So basically – if you do not see any updates here for the next week it does not mean that I have been harmed or hurt, it probably just means that I made it to China ok!

Again, I am not leaving because I want to get out of Japan, things here are, as I have mentioned earlier, quite ok in Tokyo. I just spoke to my school today, classes will start as normal in the beginning of April. Everything is fine with me, there is no need to worry. I will try to update from China, but I am not sure yet about what time and availability there will be to the internet.

Hope you are all doing ok, and sending some good thoughts to the parts of Japan which are affected by the current situation.

I should write something, to let whomever reads this know that things are ok. I am just at a bit of a loss for words. What has happened in Japan is horrible. But – things are ok in Tokyo. They are just a tad bit different than usual. Most things are the same as before. In the past couple of days, the Japanese government said that there was a 70% chance of another big quake. When the quake first happened on Friday, I was just happy that nobody I knew had been harmed, and I thought everything would go back to normal. Then the TV images flashed over the screen, tsunami, nuclear disaster, flood, dead bodies … and slowly I slowly started to grasp the magnitude of this catastrophe. The news makes me cringe, I feel for the people who are affected by these events.

That being said, of course things are absolutely horrible for the areas that are affected. No doubt about that. I don’t think that the media can truly report how awful it is for the people who have lost their loved ones and their entire life and all their belongings in this disaster. But – please keep in mind, the media is also trying to sensationalize things all the time. I gave an interview via mail (phones were not working) on Friday for a big newspaper in Norway (about 5 hours after the quake), got on the front page of their internet page. I wrote in my comments via mail to the newspaper that things were calm under the evacuation and that everyone acted professionally. What did the newspaper choose as a headline? “Had to turn around during evacuation because of the smell of gas.” What the newspaper chose as a headline was true, when we were going to a nearby school for evacuation we had to go somewhere else because it did smell like gas. But, the evacuation process was not dramatic at all, and everything was calm and in order. I am not mad at the newspaper at all, of course they have to publish things that sell, but I want all people who are worried sick to take a deep breath, and if you have to worry, worry about the poor people in the areas that were severely affected, not me and not Tokyo. Not now. I am doing fine.

This also goes for the nuclear news. I understand that it seems very very scary, but even if there is a nuclear meltdown, it is not necessarily that dangerous. This was the article that I read that actually gave me some peace of mind.

When it comes to news, I watch NHK in Japanese, and NHK in English.

For those of us living in Tokyo, most things are just like usual, the stores are open, McDonald’s right around the corner from my house is open, Japanese people are calm and quiet like they always are. I went to Shinjuku yesterday to do some shopping, and the only things that were different were minor things. The stores had reduced opening hours. They closed at 17:00 and 18:00 instead of 21:00 and 22:00. All the big billboards have gone black, to save electricity. A great deal of shops have turned off their electric billboard fronts, also to save electricity. When we went to shop for some extra food today, the store still had quite a bit of food. Of course they were running low on certain things, but there was still more than enough food in the store. The lines were incredibly long at the store though, they went all the way to the back of the store, and we probably spent about 30 minutes just standing in line. I think that if this would have been another country such a situation would have created chaos, but Japanese people are absolutely great at standing in line, being patient and staying calm.

The only thing that is very different that has effected me personally to any real extent is that my school decided to close for the rest of the term. They want to make sure the building is ok, and also to be on the safe side because of the potential aftershocks. So all of a sudden I got an unexpected two week vacation, and all the tests that were scheduled are not happening. I feel grateful for my school’s decision, because even though I am fine and everyone around me is fine, it is hard to concentrate and buckle down and focus on studying with everything else going on. I am sitting glued to the news and I am basically very inefficient.

But I am ok.

I already wrote a little bit about the earthquake yesterday, and I do not want to turn this into a news-blog, but here are two pictures showing parts of the apartment when I got home about 4 hours after the earthquake. For the most part the things are ok, apart from Broken Riedel champagne glasses, and well, the printer in the picture above was in pieces. Today has been strangely calm, I should keep on studying Japanese for my final tests next week, my school wrote that unless something severe happens, classes will be as usual from Monday.

There are still aftershocks as I type this, and I have been feeling kind of seasick all day. Apparently there have been over 100 aftershocks and I can not tell if the house is shaking most of the time, or if it is just me who is dizzy.

Apart from that they might take away the electricity for a while to save power, so that means no internet for a while. But I have food and water and everything I need, so I am sure things will be ok. I just want things to get back to normal, everything is very quiet and eerie right now. I can not believe all the damage I see on the TV, what Tokyo experienced was nothing compared to all of those poor people further up north. It is just unreal.

There has been a huge earthquake here today. I believe it was 8.8? First of all, I am ok, and everyone I know is ok.

I was at school when it happened. At first when it started both my classmates and me thought it was just good fun. A lot of smaller quakes happen here all the time, so we did not think much of it. However, the quake did not stop, and it just became stronger and stronger, so we followed procedure, opened the windows and went to stand in the doorway and hid under our desks. And the earthquake just continued and continued for several minutes. We have 避難訓練 (Earthquake drill) once every third month, so at least we knew what we had to do and what not to do. Go away from the windows, make sure you are not next to anything that can fall, hide under your desk so you will not get the lamps and roof falling on your head. All that jazz. We then went to be evacuated at a primary school nearby, but it smelled of gas around the school, so we went to Waseda University instead. Everyone was acting calm and everything worked out ok, but this was the first time I have felt truly scared when an earthquake happened here. They are so usual that nobody even reacted when it first started. When we were walking out of our classroom, a wall with mirrors broke right next to my classmates. Everything was shaking and falling down everywhere. When I finally got back to the apartment, there was a lot of broken glass everywhere, but all the important things (Macbook + cameras) are ok. About the tsunami, I am not scared for me personally, because I do not live on the coast, but I am following the updates on the news, and everything just seems a bit unreal at the moment. I am following the NHK news right now, and I hope things will calm down and the worst is over.

But the important part: I am ok. Everyone I know here is ok.

Jeg er fremdeles fersk i bloggverdenen. Jeg vet ikke hvordan det lille bloggsamfunnet i Norge fungerer, og jeg har enda ikke helt funnet min egen stemme. Jeg er ingen skribent. Jeg går ikke rundt med en liten Jon Fosse eller Tomas Espedal i magen som hvisker nydelige fraser til meg som jeg kan lire av meg på bloggen min. Men jeg skriver likevel. Akkurat nok til å klare å beskrive bildene jeg poster. Litt på engelsk, litt på norsk og litt på japansk når anledningen byr seg.

Jeg er ingen grammatikknazi, og jeg er helt sikker på mitt eget språk inneholder en rekke feil. Alle har lov å gjøre feil. Alle har lov til å ikke vite hvordan man staver et ord eller ikke være sikker på hvor man skal putte inn «ham» fremfor «han». Det er lov å skrive blogginnlegg på Internett selv om man ikke gikk ut med en sekser i norsk fra videregående skole.

Men… det er en feil som irriterer meg grenseløst mye mer enn alle andre feil jeg ser daglig, nemlig særskriving. Å dele opp ord som ikke skal deles på norsk. «Stekt kylling lever» og «stekt kyllinglever» er to vidt forskjellige ting. «Tunfisk biter i vann» og «Tunfiskbiter i vann» er ikke samme sak. «Tvilling pult i glass» er noe ganske annet enn «tvillingpult i glass».

Jeg tror grunnen til at særskriving irriterer meg mer enn andre språklige feil er at teksten blir veldig vanskelig å lese. Mellomrommene som ikke skal være der virker milelange i mitt hode, og teksten blir uklar og amatørmessig.

Jeg har surfet litt rundt ulike norske fotoblogger i det siste, og det er veldig mange talentfulle unge jenter i alderen 14 – 20 år i Norge som har skaffet seg en fotoblogg, og som atpåtil tar fine bilder. Det virker som om disse unge bloggpikene lever i en fin liten symbiose med hverandre, og de skriver ofte kommentarer til hverandre som “kjempe fint”, “kjempe flink” og “kjempe bra”.

Jeg biter meg selv i leppen og holder fingrene fra tastaturet når jeg ser slike feil. Jeg vil jo ikke virke uvennlig, vanskelig eller pedantisk. Jeg ville ikke bryte meg inn i deres lille univers og kjefte og smelle. Jeg lukker nettleservinduet. (Eller «nett leser vinduet» som de ville skrevet.) Jeg tenker til meg selv at de unge pikene kanskje bare ikke vet bedre. At ingen har sagt det til dem at det de skriver er feil, og at de kommer til å vokse det av seg. Man må bare gi dem litt tid.

I går ble synet mitt på disse unge pikene forandret. Jeg holder på miste håpet om at de kommer til å vokse av seg særskrivingen. Jeg så tilfeldigvis en anonym kommentar i en fotoblogg, hvor det stod: «Kjempeflink skrives i et ord, jeg tenkte du ville rette opp i det. Fine bilder forresten.» Men hva svarte den unge fotobloggeren? «Hei. Kjempe flink er det vanligste å skrive.» Da jeg så svaret fra bloggeren tenkte jeg: «Jøss, er det virkelig blitt mest vanlig å skrive noe som er så feil?» Jeg bestemte meg for å gjøre et kjapt Google-søk som gav meg følgende tall: «Kjempeflink» fikk 374,000 treff. «Kjempe flink» fikk 222,000 treff. Så riktignok hadde den unge fotobloggeren feil da hun skrev at «kjempe flink» var det vanligste å skrive, men jeg ble overrasket over hvor mange treff det faktisk var på «kjempe flink». Da jeg søkte etter «kjempeflink» kom Google med forslag om at jeg heller burde søke etter «kjempe flink». Sukk.

Er normen i endring? Må jeg bare akseptere at «sær skriving» blir vanligere og vanligere? Eller skal jeg ta på meg rollen som grammatikknazi og svinge med pisken?

“At TEDxRainier, Patricia Kuhl shares astonishing findings about how babies learn one language over another — by listening to the humans around them and “taking statistics” on the sounds they need to know. Clever lab experiments (and brain scans) show how 6-month-old babies use sophisticated reasoning to understand their world.”

I am not sure if I am completely in agreement with this talk – especially the point about how adults can not learn new languages fluently – basically this video builds up under the view that it is impossible to learn new languages as an adult. However, I have met several people who have become incredibly good at new languages they started to learn as adults. Especially people who learn English – they become immersed in English, probably because English influence is all around them, and they end up sounding next to native (at least to my ears).

At the same time I am thinking about the Norwegian language, I have not yet met a single person who came to Norway when they were older than maybe 12 – 14 years old who sound completely Norwegian. Their grammar and vocabulary might be fabulous and flawless, but you can still hear that there is this slight something (accent? naturalness?) which gives them away. Somebody prove me wrong here, please. I would really love to be wrong about this.

I am assuming that Paticia Kuhl is talking about true multilingualism in her talk above, and not the ability to make yourself understood in another language (using great grammar and vocabulary). She is saying that it is only infants up to age 10 months who can truly learn to distinguish different sounds from different languages. At the same time, after just spending a year in Japan – my Japanese is far from good, it is not even decent – but I can hear a much clearer difference between different Japanese sounds than what I did when I first moved to Japan. On that note, I know quite a few Japanese people that have made a huge improvement and can actually distinguish between English r and l, even if they did not learn this as an infant.

All in all, I thought this talk had some interesting points, but I get a bit sad thinking that I am basically in the middle of mission impossible here, trying to learn Japanese. That being said, my goal is not multilingualism, my goal is to have a decent conversation in Japanese and be able to express my option without having to directly translate every word in my head. And I think this is possible for most adults, and maybe we have to leave the perfect sounds up to the infants who can not utter a single word yet.

(Old picture, ca 2002)

I am sitting here, armed with coffee, cigarettes and Japanese books, and I am trying to figure out why the little squiggles on the paper don’t wish to be deciphered today. The strangeness of this week continues, I think there have been 3 earthquakes this week (small ones), it feels funny when the ground underneath you is literally shaking. Yesterday evening an ambulance stopped right next to the house, and a woman was carried out and put in the ambulance by paramedics. I think she will be ok though. I saw it all from the veranda, and I couldn’t quite connect the dots. There is just something in the air this week.