My hump

Tomorrow is my last day of school, I’ve survived almost all my final exams. Only one exam left in Japanese. Tonight there is a Christmas party in our dorm but I have to study so I’ll just stay there for a short while. I also have to prepare some things before my mother gets here. We are going to stay in a “weekly mansion”, a kind of apartment that you can rent for a shorter period of time. I think this might be one of the last times I write under my winter vacation because I won’t have the internet at the weekly mansion. I’ll write, but I’ll probably publish it later.
Today I was told that they’re probably going to take my tutor away from me! Noooo, I cried. But they didn’t seem to listen to me. I hope that they forget about it under the winter vacation. Many people are complaining about our Japanese classes, saying they’re not good. But I think that the classes are quite good. I think that the people complaining might just not want to study very much. If we didn’t have tests all the time I don’t think I would study as hard. And to learn a language you have to study very hard.
Today at the gym something quite awful happened to me. Thank god for Pia, she really has my back! I was walking on the walking machine and listening to music. Then I see Pia talking to this guy that was standing behind me. I see him leave and she calls my name so I take out my earphones. Pia tells me that the guy had been filming my behind and taking pictures of it! What! I run after him but he has already entered the males locker room. So I go and report the incident to the staff at the gym and when he comes out they catch him. But of course he has already deleted the pictures/movies and they can’t do anything more than taking his name and telephone number. The staff tells me that they’re sorry but that the only thing they can do is to keep an eye on him since the guy claims that Pia and I are lying. I just hope that he wasn’t smart enough to send the pictures to his mail before he deleted them. This is not something that only happens in Japan, it happens everywhere. Even in Sweden that is supposed to be the most equal country, between the sexes, in the world. People putting cameras in the toilet and taking pictures of girls on the beach etc. I’m already scared at night, trying not to walk alone on the streets. I don’t take a cab by myself and try not to smile at strangers. Now, can’t I even go to the gym?

Caution: Angry feminist text

Good morning. Another Sunday with cleaning and studying!
Only one week left until my mother’s coming. My friend Taku has offered to drive me to the airport on Saturday and I accepted. So I won’t have any trouble finding the airport and getting of at the wright terminal etc!
The week that’s coming up I have two final exams in Japanese. I have to study a lot. My teacher wanted to take away my tutor because she thinks I don’t need her anymore but I really like my tutor, Tadokoro-san, so I said that I still have trouble reading…I hope they let me keep her. I passed two exams last week, biologi and Japanese. Biology went okay and I think I did quite well in Japanese too.
I had lunch with my old friend’s father, Daniel’s father Mats, on Friday. I hadn’t seen him since I was 16 but we had a nice time eating and talking. He works in Tokyo so I thought I might contact him, and I’m very glad that I did! It was very interesting talking to him, he seems to have done so much. We’ll probably meet again, I really hope so! I hope I’ll get the chance to meet Daniel here too.
Yesterday, I was walking home from the store and this man ran up to me and shouted: “Excuse me miss, could I talk to you?”. I stopped and he began telling me that he was learning English but that he didn’t have any international friends to speak with. I thought it was a little bit strange because he spoke English very well. He continued asking me if I wanted to meet with him and just talk and become friends. I was honest to him and told him that I had to much to do that I didn’t even have the time for the friends I already had. But I asked him if he wanted me to ask at my dorm if someone else wanted to be his language exchange partner. He told me that he preferred if I could try to find time to talk to him but that if I had any other girlfriends he would be happy. “but” he said, “I want them to be beautiful girls like you”. I asked if it was okay with beautiful boys and he said “No”. Hmmm…strange. He also had a very fancy car so I asked myself why he just didn’t find an English teacher. I really wanted to help him even if he seemed a bit weird but he did one mistake and that was to give me his business card. When I came home I googled his work place, Seventh Heaven, and I found out that it is one of Tokyo’s biggest strip clubs! They’re everywhere, the men trying to make you take nude photos or work as a hostess. I already have one other guy that gave me his card. This is the downside of a big city. You can’t trust people because there is always someone wanting to exploit you. Specially as a girl. They know that we are students and that we often need money and as a stripper it’s said that you can make a lots of money. Probably some do but many don’t. The sex industry is very dangerous in Japan, and other countries too. As a stripper you don’t only have to dance you also have to sell drinks which means that you have to consume a lot of alcohol. There are many girls that get raped etc. You also pay the club for dancing so if you don’t sell any drinks or table dances you end up owing the club money. And just stripping is, what I believe, bad for you because you make yourself become an object. And even if an individual is okay with that, women all over the world lose. The costumers that visit these clubs don’t have a good view of women and all they want is to consume you. But as a young girl you’re not always aware of this, and some girls maybe just don’t care. I believe this is one proof of why the sex industry is so negative for women, because wherever we go we are always seen as merchandise, not people. Our body’s are not our own, it doesn’t matter who you are or where you are. I will never have the right to my own body and even if I I try to do something else with my life I will always be seen as something that can be used and sold. People tell me to take it as a compliment but I don’t. It’s actually exactly the opposite, it’s an insult. And then people ask why some feminists are angry! Damn sure I get angry! I told one of the guys in the dorm and he seriously asked me if I was going to call the guy. And he’s maybe right, some girls would probably call him. I’m so happy I don’t have to take my cloth off to make my way through life. I just wish people around me could realize that.

Soon time for bed. Every night I try to go to bed early but I never succeed. Many people have said this before me but I just want to repeat it: 24 hours is not enough. I need more time. When I wake up I have the whole day ahead of me and suddenly I have to go to bed and there’s still so much to do.
Today I went to an interview held by a TV-company that are going to broadcast a show about foreigners in Japan. A friend told me about it and I mailed them and, as I just wrote, I went to Roppongi for an interview. It went well but I was feeling very stressed because of my final exam that I have tomorrow in one of my courses. I haven’t studied at all for it so I’ll just have to wake up early tomorrow and do everything I should have done today. But I think it was worth it, I mean I might be one of the lucky gajins joining this show…who knows….
Tomorrow, after school, I’m going to buy my karate cloth with my karate group. It will be fun, they even embroider my name on it if I want! And I also have to study for my final exams in Japanese. But this weekend I will go out and do something fun, last weekend was very calm because of my cold. But I need to do some fun things now. Ayumi invited me to a Christmas party and I’m going to meet some new friends of mine and Pia too.
The other day I received a call from a woman who wanted to invite me for dinner. It took me a while before I understood that it was a friend of my friend Achara that I worked with at Octapharma this summer! So on sunday we’re having lunch at a vegetarian restaurant in Shinjuku. I will give her some glögg and pepparkakor that I purchased at the Swedish embassy. I think she’ll be happy.
I’ve also started to teach my French student English. It’s going well considering I don’t speak very much Japanese and he doesn’t speak English. He’s joining the French army and therefore he wanted to learn French but he changed his mind into English instead. In the beginning he didn’t smile or talk very much but now he’s beginning to open up. But sometimes I don’t know how Japanese guy’s brains work because he sent me an e-mail saying I was charming etc. I don’t know exactly what he meant by that. But I asked my friends that teach and they said it is quite common that (male) students do so (with female teachers).
Soon winter vacation is coming up, I really need it. I’m so glad my mum is coming, it will be so much fun. I hope she likes it here.
By the way I think I was named after the wrong God, I would have loved to have 10 hands instead of a bad temper.

My winter vacation is coming up and my mother will be arriving soon! I’m really looking forward to it.
I passed my exams last week but I managed to get a cold. So now I’m sick.
I was feeling quite bad already on Thursday but instead of taking the weekend to rest I went to Andreas birthday dinner party on Friday night at a really nice Italian restaurant close to Roppongi. The food was very good and we had fun, I left early though because on Saturday I had to get up early to go to another city, Hakone, with Pia and Tatsuki. Hakone was great and we hiked and visited the warm springs, called spa. They’re divided into two sections, one for male and one for female. That’s good because you are completely naked. It was outside and you had the sky and the moon over your head. I think that the warm springs might have helped me getting even more sick because it was cold in the air and I was naked so even if the water was warm I caught a cold. This trip was a whole day trip so we came back quite late. On Sunday I had a French lesson with a new student. He doesn’t speak English or French at all and my Japanese is quite bad so it was quite interesting. In the end of the class he was quite tired and he told me that French is difficult. You can imagine that it is difficult for him because it’s completely different from Japanese. Things as feminine and masculine, plural and singular doesn’t exist at all in Japanese. He also seems to be a worker and not a academic so he’s not very used to studying, he didn’t seem very happy when I told him he had homework for the next class! I’ve made a promise to myself and that is to teach him French and make him like it.
After the lesson I went to the Swedish embassy for their Christmas bazaar. It is funny how I never get used to people thinking Swedish things and culture is exotic! There were many Swedes there but also a lot of Japanese people. They had varmkorv, lösviktsgodis and knäckebröd….
My karate club, Seishinkai, threw a party for all the new members on Sunday evening. I had a lot of fun, they’re so nice to us! Everyone brought something to eat, I brought a cake, and then we ate and talked. We had to introduce ourselves and after the introduction our captain, Maisa, asked the other members if they had any questions for us. And one of the guys raised his hand and said that he had a question for me. Maisa told him to ask me the question and then he asked me if I had a boyfriend! I started laughing and told him that I had a boyfriend but if he was interested in me he had to try to impress me in karate to convince me! (Lennart: I was just joking!!!!) And then we all laughed. Maisa told me not to listen to the guys in the karate circle because they’re to stupid and then she told them to be quiet. She’s so funny!
As you can see I didn’t have much time to rest but today I just have one class so I can take it easy. I had to cancel with Kai and Taku that I was supposed to meet. But I’ll see them as soon as I’m genki again!