Japanese Conversation Friends

An Organized Friendship

There is a club on campus called "Japanese Conversation Friends" that both Jessi and I joined. I was a little unsure of how the club worked at first but it's actually quite simple. The ask you to fill out a little survey about yourself, and then they match you with a Japanese student at AIU with similar tastes. The goal is to help with immersion into Japanese language, as well as try and intergrate international students with the Japanese student populations.

I was a little trepadacious about getting assigned a "friend", but it's actually a great program. I put down the usual stuff, I like video games, I'm a writing major, etc etc etc. This past week we met our paired friends.

My partner's name is Shoko, she's from a prefecture near Tokyo (close to Saitama as well where I did my home-stay after Highschool). She's an only child, she has a cat, her favorite color is orange, she's a business major, and V for Vendetta is one of her favorite movies.

We met, talked about arranging a weekly meeting time, and met again last week. Thursday's at 9:00. At first our conversations were a little awkward, talking about plans for the weekend and whats your family like and all that jazz. We talked about traveling for a while. She has been to Italy before, as I have as well. The two of us share a strong passion for Italian food, and for a while talked about Tiramasu.


Tiramasu? / ちあらます?
Interestingly, she mentioned that she had no idea that Tiramasu was italian, until she came to Italy. She believed that it was a contemporary Japanese dessert. Given the availability of Tiramasu flavored products in Japan, or Tiramasu parfate cups at conveniance stores, it's actually easy to see how she was mistaken. I took a brief look at the history of Tiramasu, and apparently it was a big fad in Japan in the 70's. I have heard this before though that people believe Tiramasu to be Japanese.

At first glance it doesn't make sense though, coffee, rum, chocolate, and cake are the basis for Tiramasu, but none of them originate in Japan, nor are they particulalry popular. Apparently the confusion is linguistic in nature, Tiramasu apparently sounds like a Japanese word, enough for many people of the younger generation to just assume it's a Japanese dessert. Marketing has played off on this, so Tiramasu has actually been ingrained into the culture somewhat. Awesome! That means more for me!

I would definately say there is more Tiramasu in Japan than even in the United State.


Anyway I digress . . .

We also talked about colors, I know the basic colors in Japanese red, blue, yellow, purple, brown, white, black, green, etc, but I don't know any of the words for the more advanced colors like magenta, beige, turquoise, etc, or even what kinds of colors the japanese distinquish within their language. I taught her "turqouise" and she taught me "mizuiro". Literally, water color, mizuiro is light blue.

and continue to digress

An interesting note about colors in Japan. Some modern day words for colors are borrowed from english "orenji" "pinku" "gurei". However many words that are ethnically Japanese for colors are based on some specific object. The word for blue is litterally "sea" colored, and the word from brown is litterally "tea" colored.

Very interesting system, and it shows some cultural values in Japan due to what they find important enough and widely known enough to base colors off of.

Back to our Heroes

After talking about colors, Shoko's friend showed up, a girl who was from Saitama, more than that she had gone to Warabi Highschool, more than that she had gone to Warabi Highschool at the same time that I had visited it on my Japan trip 3 years ago.

It was kind of trippy, we talked a little about the uniforms there, and some of the stuff around the town. I still have a clip on my back pack that says Warabi Highschool on it. It was a pretty cool experiance.

They asked what level of Japanese I was in, I told them 102, and they seemed suprised. The girl from Saitama said something that suprised me though, she said that I "spoke pretty" or at least thats what I understood her as. She explained herself though and said that I had a very good accent, that when I spoke I sounded like I knew Japanese very well.

I took this as an upmost compliment, I may very well have done decently in 201 or struggled through 301, but I have forgotten so much that I'm still having some difficulty in 102 (though 80% of that trouble is with kanji). It's nice to know that I have been talking well enough to get a compliment like that. At times I'm undure if I'm even coherant. Though I admit my goal in coming to Japan is not primarily to improve my language skills, I will continue to work hard as hard as I can to improve my Japanese.

We then talked about movies, my conversation partner has a thing for Bruce Willis, and I plan to show her Hudson Hawk at some point. They said that they would love to help me with my independant study of Japanese Game Language, they're help will be invaluable. Both of them were freshman, and I'm sure their going through the huge crazy experiance that is the beggining of college life, but I was very thankful for their time, patience and support.

I continue to love my time here in Japan.

-Mack