I ♥ Kasuganomichi

Russell has devoted a great deal of time over the last year to try and find groups to join, friends to talk to, events to enjoy - anything to help him meet people and use more Japanese. He's been a trooper, but his socializing scheme has not panned out so well. You have followed some of the "Join a Band" saga (I have a happy update coming), but there have been so many more attempts that have gone the same direction.

Conversation partners: Russell was lucky enough to meet an awesome friend who he spent a lot of time with for the first 6 months... until that friend moved to LA.

Bands: Russell joined one band only to have almost everyone else become to busy or quit before they could rehearse together. He auditioned for another band, but their lead singer quit and they disbanded, and finally, he tried out for another band where he didn't get a call back.

Local bar: This one worked okay. He always has somewhere he can go to chat. He also gets the benefit of chatting with men, which is good because men's speech and women's speech is not the same in Japan. Its a problem when men learn to speak with women Japanese friends.

Mixi: Mixi is an online social network in Japan, not unlike Facebook. It took Russell a lot of work to get an account (he finally had to contact his old university to reactivate his student email address) but he managed to get in. He decided to search for groups to join and typed in Kasuganomichi (our neighborhood). Lo and behold, there was an "I ♥ Kasuganomichi" club. He joined. He was then invited to come to an I ♥ Kasuganomichi club party.

And that's where our latest adventure begins.

Last night Russell and I went to meet some of the other folks in our neighborhood. The party was a house party (our first in Japan). We met the party planner at the train station and headed to the next station over. The party was in one of the members' apartments. When we arrived there were three low tables set up with a big electric skillet in the middle of the table and tons of plates heaped with meat and bowls full of vegetables. We were handed beers and chu-hai (a sort of carbonated, fruit flavored alcohol) and sat down to talk with people and wait for the crowd to gather. It turns out there were about 7 other people at the party (apparently a low turn out).

Who else was there?

There was the party planner - a third year university student, the owner of the apartment (a nurse), a preschool teacher, a local mafia guy (this might have been a joke, but he did have a giant dragon tatoo on his arm), a tennis instructor, an international automotive businessman, a gas station attendant, and a guy who was certainly the life of the party but I have no idea what his job was.

It was a very mixed crowd of 20-30 year olds and it was a LOT of fun. They were all very welcoming, the food was AMAZING (and extremely plentiful). We gorged ourselves on grilled meat and vegetables, then the hostess started making grilled onigiri (rice balls) and since two birthdays had just gone by, next came two big (delicous) cakes. At some point after this, one of the guests realized that we hadn't made the yakisoba yet! It was voted down. We were all a little over stuffed.

We also spent the whole evening speaking Japanese. Russell is able to actually do full on Japanese, now, I was able to follow the conversations pretty darn well, but I'm still not quick or confident enough to participate. I need to work on that.

We were invited to go camping with them in August.