Approaching Midsummer

By Benno Lauer

It's the night before the day before Midsummer's Day in Japan--though the solstices get rather short shrift in this country in favor of the equinoxes--and I recently got home from Day 3 of my 40-day internship.  A summer internship sounds long, two months sounds a little shorter, and eight weeks shorter still.  But when you put it in terms of working days, it helps explain why the time just flies, doesn't it?  I guess it's already 7.5% of the way done.

On Friday, June 10, Molly and I went in to the company's Tokyo office for a brief pre-internship meeting.  Good thing we did--otherwise I think I would have shown up a few days early.  The office manager and the human resources liaison outlined the timeframe they had in mind for the internship: precisely eight weeks, starting Thursday, June 16, and ending Wednesday, August 10.  They gave us a care package of snacks produced by the company, and cups of delicious boysenberry juice.  And I got my first bit of homework: to choose the most natural-sounding English rendering of a new company slogan.

Sunday evening, June 12, Molly and I agreed on several possible translations which all sounded pretty natural to us, I emailed them in, and we rushed to the bus depot near Tokyo's Shinjuku Station for a quick overnight trip to the city of Kyoto.  We left at 11:50 p.m. and snoozed the whole way until we arrived at 7:30 or so at the bus pool outside Kyoto Station's Karasuma Street (i.e. north) entrance.  A two-day whirlwind ensued, with a brief overnight on actual bed cushions (Japanese futon are just cushions, not couches!) in one of the Tour Club hostel's private rooms.  I think we saw five major sites each day.  No wonder that our knees, legs, and feet ached in various places as we groggily navigated Tokyo Station Wednesday morning after our return night bus.  The famous Tsukiji Fish Market--our reason for returning to Tokyo Station rather than Shinjuku Station--was closed, so we hobbled home more relieved that nap time had come early than disappointed that we'd missed an eleventh sight.

Thursday I started my internship.  Excited and, when it came time to be greet everyone after I was introduced at the forty-strong morning meeting, more than a little nervous, I had a lot of paperwork explained to me and filled some of it out.  Friday and today I finished the rest of it.  All three days I worked on an English translation for the contract and examined the company profile's English version, partly to learn about the company, partly to spot unnatural-sounding wording.  Thursday I was sent home with two cell phones: an iPhone for my use and a phone for Molly, too.  Today on my lunch break I ordered a name stamp ("Lauer" in katakana) from the nearest stationery store, and after my return home I purchased a monthlong commuter pass at the station.  I feel as if I'm starting to get into the swing of things, though I'm thinking my assigned tasks may get a little bit more intense soon.

Molly memorized 16 Japanese phonetic characters today: 8 hiragana and 8 katakana, and was already spotting them at the grocery store when we made a quick run to add hotdogs to the rice-and-jambalaya-sauce dish Molly had cooked up.  Maybe we can get into the habit of doing some language study together--I certainly could stand to learn a lot more Han ideographs!

And Molly and I are getting settled in here at home, too.  After our initial cleaning frenzy, we've slowly made progress on the odds and ends.  Friday she got the towel rods to stay up, yesterday I cleaned up a pile of papers in the bedroom, and today she cleaned the little back balcony where the washing machine is located.  She's quite the expert now at using Japanese ATMs and train lines, and we were able to open a video rental account in her name thanks to the passport photocopy she had in her purse (PA/DC driving licenses would not count for identification, we were told).  Friday night using said account we watched The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Brad Pitt, Casey Affleck).  At Molly's request, we listened to the English original rather than the Japanese overdub with English subtitles (my usual preference in this country, for the language practice).  :-)  Saturday we took a run and went to Molly's first hot spring bath.  Sunday we attended a morning worship service at Tokyo Union Church--for the second week in a row!

So the "normal part" of our summer seems officially to have begun; with it comes this first post from me.  Hopefully my posts will follow Molly's a little quicker most of the time.  Thanks for keeping tabs on us, and feel free to contact us personally as well!