We went out for lunch today at the fancy hotel at the town center. You can see our two lunches above. When Americans think of Japanese food, they often think of things like sushi, but this is another form of traditional Japanese cuisine; lots of small bits of food carefully chosen and arranged to create a mélange of shape, color, taste, and texture. If you go at dinner time, this kind of food usually starts around US $50 and goes up from there, but for lunch these two meals cost about $18 and $23 respectively. I had the seasonal “cherry blossom special” and if you look at the picture you can see a twig with cherry blossoms arranged as part of the meal. Wes’s rice (in the other photo) was also arranged in the shape of a cherry blossom. Very elegant with all the waitresses in kimono.
As we were paying, the head waiter complimented me on my Japanese and asked how long I had been in Japan. I explained that I had previously spent two years living in Iwate Prefecture. He said that he himself was from Miyagi Prefecture (just south of Iwate). At that point I noticed something interesting. There are several different ways to say the pronoun “I” in Japanese with varying levels of politeness and familiarity. Up until that point, in his role as waiter, he had been using extremely polite Japanese. But when he said he was from Miyagi, he used a more informal pronoun, momentarily stepping out of his role as head waiter to converse on a more personal level. It was a perfect example of the kind of shifting between styles that I am here to study.
After lunch I went to the university to print out some things. (We didn’t bring a printer with us, so I have to go to campus whenever I want to print something.) As it turned out, it was graduation and the campus was filled with young men in suits and women wearing brightly colored kimonos and hakama. A hakama is a sort of a split, pleated skirt, usually in dark blue or maroon. In the US, they are used in some martial arts such as aikido. In Japan, they are associated with scholarship more generally and are the standard thing for women to wear at their graduation, sort of the equivalent of our cap and gown. So there were groups of graduates all around campus holding bouquets of flowers and having their picture taken together holding their diplomas. The odd thing was that there were no crowds of proud parents. But when I got to the bus stop to go home, I found all the parents apparently going home separately from the graduates.
As we were paying, the head waiter complimented me on my Japanese and asked how long I had been in Japan. I explained that I had previously spent two years living in Iwate Prefecture. He said that he himself was from Miyagi Prefecture (just south of Iwate). At that point I noticed something interesting. There are several different ways to say the pronoun “I” in Japanese with varying levels of politeness and familiarity. Up until that point, in his role as waiter, he had been using extremely polite Japanese. But when he said he was from Miyagi, he used a more informal pronoun, momentarily stepping out of his role as head waiter to converse on a more personal level. It was a perfect example of the kind of shifting between styles that I am here to study.
After lunch I went to the university to print out some things. (We didn’t bring a printer with us, so I have to go to campus whenever I want to print something.) As it turned out, it was graduation and the campus was filled with young men in suits and women wearing brightly colored kimonos and hakama. A hakama is a sort of a split, pleated skirt, usually in dark blue or maroon. In the US, they are used in some martial arts such as aikido. In Japan, they are associated with scholarship more generally and are the standard thing for women to wear at their graduation, sort of the equivalent of our cap and gown. So there were groups of graduates all around campus holding bouquets of flowers and having their picture taken together holding their diplomas. The odd thing was that there were no crowds of proud parents. But when I got to the bus stop to go home, I found all the parents apparently going home separately from the graduates.
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