The Other Side: Presentation Day & Hilde’s 21st Birthday

First Architecture Presentation

On Saturday November 7^th, we were scheduled to present a new public facility that we were introducing to the town of Tsuyazaki to professors and the actual residents of Tsuyazaki were invited to come critique our ideas. This is a unique opportunity in architecture presentations to actually present and get feedback from the people who we are actually designing our (hypothetical) project for. So at 8:30 AM on Saturday we left school and went to Tsuyazaki to present the projects we’ve been working on for the last 6 weeks or so. All of the foreign students said at least one or two sentences in broken Japanese because we wanted to make an effort and show we were committed to trying to fit in and assimilate the culture. With the help of my tutor Gas-san he helped me translate my concept on my presentation board entirely into Japanese and write it out into Romanji so that I could read it out on presentation day. Sounds easy enough except even to read it fluently and coherently and to make it sound like I didn’t just come down with a serious case of the hiccups is not an easy task. So I practiced the 5 minute speech over and over for an hour the night before until I could say it in about 2 ½ minutes. The style of presentation here is slightly different than what I’m used to back at home. They allow everyone about 2-3 minutes to speak and they hold all questions and comments from the professors and other critics until the poster session which is a 45 minute walk-around of all the pinned up boards and they ask us questions directly which we can explain in further detail afterwards. I was the only foreign student who had a prepared speech and had rehearsed the night before so I had an unfair advantage. I was also the only one who did my entire presentation in Japanese and despite I read my speech as I had down 50 times before careful not to mispronounce any syllables and trying to keep a calm but appropriately hasty pace. Afterwards the professor came up to me and told me that I had perfect pronunciation and that I was the best foreign speaker. He only notices a second later that he is surrounded by the other foreign students and tells them that they were very good too. I take it as a good thing, even though I had no idea what I was saying, apparently I can at least fake speaking Japanese decently.

After Party

After we finish the project, everyone, teachers and students alike are relieved and everyone is invited to go out to eat hotpot and nomihodai (all you can drink) together. So we all go and I meet many of my classmates for the first time. Most of them are very reserved and they’re pretty hard to approach, speak to or befriend in class. It was nice to talk to them in a social setting and alcohol loosens them up a little too. I learn one of my professors spent 13 years studying and researching in Arizona and I’m honestly a little surprised his English isn’t better but I guess he’s forgotten a lot since he’s been back in Japan for quite some time. It’s strange to go out eating and drinking with teachers and students, but it was a nice new experience. I reluctantly leave my new friends but I promised Hilde weeks in advance to celebrate with her on her 21^st birthday.

Hilde’s 21^st

This is beginning to be a costly night with two parties but both events were things I didn’t want to pass up. I was also pretty tired but Hilde is a good friend who I didn’t want to disappoint so I eventually get back to her room where there are about 10 people. They’ve been cooking, eating and drinking already for a couple hours. So I eat some food, take some pictures and soon we’re on our way to Tenjin. We go to a new club called The Godfather. It’s in a really shady part of Tenjin that I actually thought was ghetto.

//To Connie Lo: I’ve seen my first piece of litter, actually in the part of Tenjin where this club is, there was a lot of trash everywhere. It was a lot dirtier than many parts of LA, so Japan is no longer the untainted land free of litter and bad human habits. They are human too. //

The Godfather

The building this club was strange… REALLY STRANGE. It’s only accessible winding through a couple long winding alleyways that smelled of dried urine. It is sandwiched between taller buildings on all sides and the columns on the façade look as if they’re made of dinosaur bones. It’s very reminiscent of Gaudi architecture which is also very strange if you don’t know his style. Don’t be afraid to google it. But despite all these things, it apparently had two very popular clubs. The one we were going to was on floors 3 to 5. Each was pretty small but still impressive that it was a 3-story club. The third story was for live music where a rock/jazz band was playing, the second floor was a lounge with a bar and dj and the first basement floor was a darn psychedelic house club. We worked our way down slowly and eventually ended up in the house music portion. House music/dancing for those of you who are unfamiliar is a relatively new dance/music style that takes a lot of elements of other popular styles like the load slow tempoed bass sounds of hip hop with the repetitiveness of techno music. All this is being played with two large projection sheets on both sides of the dance floor displaying strange and trippy clips of the most random things you can ever imagine. It’s hard to describe how weird some of the images were, but there was a lot of colors, things and jerky motions that happened the whole time strobing and blinking threatening everyone in the room with imminent and inescapable seizures. So when we entered the dance floor, there were people there, but they weren’t dancing. People were moving from side to side, but I don’t think you can call what they were doing dancing. Most of them just rocked back and forth with a very miserable look on their face as if they were having a terrible time and hated their lives but nobody left. It was strange and everyone was zombie-like but we didn’t care and our ragtag group of gaijin and Japanese people just started to dance as crazily and obnoxiously as we’ve danced everywhere else and eventually people started to move a little more. The music was surprisingly good and actually relatively easy to dance to, but its deep bass sounds and constant repetitive patterns with a lack of any harmony parts in any of the songs gets hypnotic and you kind of just slip into a strange trance of moving and bobbing. Perhaps that’s the real goal of house clubs, but it was definitely my first experience doing it. And most people thought that the music was actually better than the majority of clubs that we’ve been to and I don’t disagree. Everyone started to enjoy themselves and Elena, Ena, Ai and most importantly the birthday girl had a great time. The club however, I did not like as much. The only discernable pattern that was consistent in the club was one single theme: WEIRD. The place was weird and it just attracts weirdos. I can’t remember any specific examples except for one guy who collapsed on the ground while dancing, was pulled into a chair, and then immediately got back up started dancing and started flopping limply on random walls. We left shortly after he started pulling those crazy shenanigans. It was an interesting night to say the least, I was dead tired and I slept until 5 PM the next day. And I was still exhausted at 5 PM, but I felt compelled to get up and be active or risk not sleeping at all the next night again. That was a crazy 24ours, that’s right, that all happened in 24 hours. O_O