Christeph in Japan

Even though in your heart of hearts, you want to travel all 280 km from Noshiro to Aomori City by pedal power alone, do take a car along on your first long-distance bike trek. Do bring friends and travel in packs, terrorizing innocent bystanders in narrow countryside streets with your badass gaijin bicycle gang. Do stop for ice cream at every opportunity, even if the only available flavor is carrot. Do keep an eye out for monkeys crossing the street, and continue to stare in awe as they nonchalantly disappear with a rustle into the trees.

Don’t be so goal-oriented that you neglect to stop and explore the Shinto shrines tucked away by the side of the road. Do imitate superheros at every available opportunity. Do accept the vacuum sealed cobs of cooked corn from the nice man at the restaurant who just took an hour and a half to make you 4 pizzas. Don’t attempt to eat them, however, (the corn, not the pizza) as mold has infiltrated the packages and is inching its way between the starchy kernels.

When you realize that you have two more hours of biking to reach your hotel and only half an hour before check-in, do ditch your bikes in the boiler room behind the local temple gift shop and hoof it by car to your destination. Don’t feel guilty; it’s not cheating, you’re on vacation.

If at all possible, do reserve a room in a swanky onsen hotel for one night. Do take full advantage of the private onsen on your porch overlooking the Japanese-style garden as the sun sets. Do try to eat everything that is brought to your room for dinner, though this will take a good part of the night, as you wade through a cornucopia of sashimi, sea urchin, grilled fish, savory custards, abalone, pickles, rice and hotpot soups.

When you resume biking, and you pass a bus full of Japanese children on the road, DO make sure you ham it up by mimicking the one physical punch-line of every Japanese comedian you’ve never seen. This will bring you good karma with the transportation gods.

Do visit Goshogawara for their Tachineputa festival. Do arrive before dark so you can stroll down the street where festival floats are lined up and float pullers are diligently preparing for the night ahead. Do get a good look at the crazy vertical hair that the good people of Goshogawara force upon their children. Don’t expect to find much in the way of dinner. And for god’s sake, DON’T mess with the policemen. They are cranky and not happy to be working crowd control. Also… don’t idly stand in front of any food stalls while watching the festival or you will be soundly bitch-slapped by the authorities.

Do reserve a room in Aomori City for the Nebuta festival, and do it as soon as possible, say, early April. Do take advantage of the bleachers that hotels have set out just for their hotel guests. Do catch bells thrown by members of the parade for good luck. Don’t miss the ample product placement by convenience stores and beer companies. Do feel free to laugh at the effeminate gymnasts in full body unitards who want you to buy their particular brand of sports drink. Don’t spend too much time wondering how someone snuck an Egyptian pharaoh into the parade.

Do have more than a passing understanding of the festival schedule. Don’t assume that all parades are at night, and don’t park underground only to find when you’re ready to leave town that the exits have been closed off for a mid-afternoon parade for the next two hours. Don’t get grumpy when this happens to you. Hug a traffic cone instead. It understands your plight. Do understand that most of these week long nebuta festivals will probably culminate with an afternoon (not evening) parade. Corollary: Don’t be surprised when you drive to Hirosaki on the last day of Neputa only to find a ghost town when you arrive at night.

Do go into the Spanish restaurant you find while looking for okonomiyaki. Do eat the entire two baskets of bread and fresh butter that miraculously appear at your table. You’ve lived in Japan for two years. You’re worth it. Do order copious amounts of the lovely cinnamony sangria that is beckoning to you from the menu. It is just as good as you imagine.

Do go to as many onsens as possible while you’re in Aomori, but DON’T expect them to have soap and shampoo. This, apparently, is a quaint Akitan custom. Don’t pick your onsens indiscriminately or you may find yourself in the Onsen Of Death, where the air is saturated with steam hotter than hell itself.

Do take a ferry to tiny fishing villages in the middle of nowhere. Don’t listen to the guy at the dock who claims that you have no time to stop and pet dogs before the ferry returns to pick you up. Do find a tiny shack of a lunch place to order and conquer the uni-don. Do listen to the cute old lady who’s serving you lunch when she tells you that you’re about to miss the one and only ferry back the mainland. Don’t forget to buy a few kakigori on the way out the door to thank her for her kindness and attention to detail.

Do set out on your return trip home on a bike with gears, if your return trip involves biking over the Shirakami mountains. Do be on your best behavior at all times when traveling, as you will inexplicably run into your landlord’s neighbor and several members of your taiko group, even though you are cycling far from home. Don’t pull into a rest stop swarming with cops if you are a foreigner driving without a license. Do lose your bike tire patching kit in lieu of actually popping a tire. Do make the slight detour to view fields of tri-tone rice that form a giant canvas upon which famous Japanese masterpieces are re-created.

Don’t hesitate to stop at a friend’s house to crash, covering his entire floor with futons for the night. Do recuperate from your travels at a local bar, sipping on beers from Belgium and Mexico while you watch the opening ceremonies of the Chinese Olympics, surrounded by friends from Canada, India, and Japan.

Do breathe in the intoxicating summer air, thick with the smell of greenery growing furiously under a bright blue sky as you return home. On your last day out, do find as many dead ends as you can, while you follow your river back home through the countryside, thus elongating your trip as much as possible. Don’t forget to look for herons tucked stealthily among the rice fields. Do stop for a moment to marvel at the din of chirping cicadas screaming over each other to be heard, their collective discord making the air shimmer in a tapestry of sound.

Do return home exhausted and collapse on your couch with schemes for future bike trips already taking shape in your head, the last thing you remember before sleep claims your weary limbs.

I like to bike through the Buddhist temple district on the way to school. The road is lined with trees, and the temples add an air of serenity. The path is generally free of students, which means I don’t have to fight my way upstream against an onslaught of preteen boys fiddling with their cellphones on their way to the junior high by my house.

But today, the atmosphere had changed. The streets were clogged with cars. Temples which are usually in a state of stasis had their doors flung open, with visitors milling around inside. Vendors were starting to assemble their kakigori stands, with the usual 氷 flags. Old ladies sat by the side of the road calling out “ikaga desu ka?”, trying to get me to buy ice cream that has been carefully molded into a pink and yellow flower bud. I know from first hand experience that this calculated presentation is a trick, that their product is an assault to the taste buds, a horrid concoction of banana and artificial strawberry that has somehow come to represent summer in Akita.

The graveyards adjacent to the temples were the hoppingest place in town at 8:15 in the morning. Families greeted each other with a smile or a wave, and gathered around graves, bringing flowers, money, and sake to family members who have passed on. A monk in a conical straw hat meandered among the gravestones, ringing a bell, ready to offer blessings to the deceased.

Welcome to the first day of Obon, where everyone in Japan returns to their hometown to be with their family and pray to their ancestors. I don’t really have any family to be with or ancestors to pray to here in Japan. But I am content to pause for a moment, to be part of this landscape for a brief few minutes on the way to work, to slow to a crawl on my bike, weaving in and out of traffic in my own private trance, dodging pedestrians and taking in the scene.

About 20 minutes ago there was a large earthquake in our neighboring prefecture of Iwate. The epicenter was right around the “tri-state area” where Akita, Iwate, and Miyagi meet.

Amazingly, I was watching the news when the earthquake happened, and an earthquake alert popped up on the television about 10 seconds before the earthquake actually arrived. The shaking was not heavy all the way over here in Noshiro, but it went on for over a minute. It felt like being on a boat, with a kind of constant vibration accompanied by big, slow swaying back and forth. I went outside and noticed all the powerlines swinging all over the place. Our landlord’s gardener was out there and didn’t seem to be noticing anything though!

More info

• Japan Meteorological Agency
• USGS
• Google Map

As you surely know if you follow us religiously (and who doesn’t?), Steph and I have been playing with Noshiro Belabo Taiko,* a local drumming group, since last summer. We’ve had a few performances around town, and have gradually gotten better as we settle into the physically demanding technique that this activity entails. But as much fun as we have had, I don’t think anyone would describe us as “hard core.”

Well that all changed last weekend, when we attended a two-day taiko workshop on the nearby Oga peninsula. This is a yearly event put together by Akita-area taiko groups, where master senseis come and impart their wisdom to us regular Joes.

Most of Belabo attended, including all three of us foreigners (Frank, Steph and me), and we were happy to see a few other JETs from around the prefecture as well.

There were a variety of courses to choose from. Being the manly men that we are, Frank and I chose the Ōdaiko (大太鼓, literally “big drum”) course. We even went so far as to purchase the biggest sticks we could find for $25. This course consisted of seven guys and the teeny instructor (Go sensei, who I believe was 27 years old) who whipped our asses into shape. After the first day’s three-hour session, I had more blisters in a smaller area than I had ever known possible. Fortunately the second day (and four more hours) didn’t make them much worse, thanks to some strategic taping.

Steph took the “new song” course, which is the general one for experienced players who don’t need to develop any particular skills. Since most of the people attending the weekend are experienced players, “new song” was by far the biggest course with around 85 people.

At the end of the first day, everyone (about 130 people altogether, as Go sensei gleefully kept reminding us we’d be performing in front of) gathered at the conference hotel and got together for a giant dinner and drumming party. A huge tatami room was lined with four rows of exquisitely apportioned individual dinner tables, complete with every kind of gross seafood you could ever not want to eat. After the food was out of the way, the room was cleared and a rollicking drum party commenced. I hope there weren’t any other guests in the hotel because this was one seriously loud party. (I love a country where you can even have drumming conventions in a room with paper walls.) Each visiting taiko group got to get up and play a piece, and there were even a few widely-known pieces where everyone who knew it was able to get up and play whatever drum was available. At the end of the night, a spontaneous pulsing beat started up and everyone was either dancing or drumming. It was probably the most fun I’ve had in Japan.

We all dreaded the second day, with our bleeding hands and sore muscles. Fortunately it was less painful than I had feared, and Sunday afternoon closed up with a fun performance where all the classes showed off all the fancy skills they had acquired over the weekend. The Ōdaiko performance was a big hit (am I right, ladies? <wink>) and the 85-person new song was amazing. If you ever get the chance to see 85 people beating the crap out of some big drums, don’t pass it up. Here is a postage-stamp-sized video (starting with Steph at the very beginning!) taken with my cell phone from the second floor:

New Song

Although the pain and fatigue were intense in the course of the workshop, we had a huge amount of fun and are excited for next year. Perhaps then I’ll take a decent camera and get some better pictures and videos.

* If you follow that link, there is a (very bad) picture of us on the front page! It’s our first performance after we had been playing for all of two weeks. ↩

We’re now coming to the end of February Festival Madness. Tohoku is a flurry of winter celebrations all month long, though for some reason we squeeze most of the action in somewhere between the second and third weekends. Allow me to sum up:

Oga’s NAMAHAGE

Any festival whose sole purpose is to make small children cry already has a plus next to it in my book. Namahage are the demons which inhabit the Oga peninsula, just to the south. They have red or blue faces and are dressed in bushy straw tunics. Twice a year, they descend from Mt. Shinzan, growling with torches in hand. They proceed to terrorize all the small children they can find, making them cry, and then ask if there are any naughty crying children nearby that they can eat up. Brilliant.

Everyone gathers around a big bonfire at the Shinzan Shrine, while the demons make a few circuits through the crowd (stopping for photo ops of course). Anyone who picks up the straw which falls from their clothes will be free of illness for the rest of the winter. Taiko also plays a prominent role in the festival, with folks dressed as demons wailing on the drums.

Namahage Taiko

The festival has an ominous-bogeyman-in-the-dark-with-fire feel that is a delicious change from the usual sugary sweet snow festival.

Nishiki’s HOT AIR BALLOONS

The hot air balloon launch, or kamifusenage, is a rather poetic and beautiful event. Cars choke narrow icy streets in a mad lineup for parking, and everyone heads out to a big snowy field. Here, huge elegantly decorated paper balloons (with ads on the other side) are filled with hot air via blowtorch. When the balloons are filled, a fire is lit at the mouth, and a warm glow fills the balloon, lighting the pictures from the inside. Balloons are released about 8 at a time, and soar off into the sky. Occasionally they’ll catch on fire or explode, but usually they simply soar away. The balloons aren’t weighted very heavily, so they swing back and forth like pendulums as they ascend. They stay lit for quite a long time, as they float up into a sea of stars. Special booths are set up where you can write your wishes for the year on balloons, which are then set free to deliver your wishes to the heavens.

Hot Air Balloons

Kariwano’s TUG-OF-WAR

The tug of war is held on the same night as the balloon launch. It’s possible to do these two events in succession if you play your cards right… unfortunately, we didn’t, and arrived in Kariwano to witness a mass exodus after the fight. Which is fine, because all I wanted to do was see the massive 20 ton rope anyway. While I was admiring the rope two dudes came by with a scythe and cut off a huge hunk for me to take home.

Rokugo’s BAMBOO FIGHT
Not the most photogenic festival, but it certainly is the most exciting. Ranked as one of the world’s Top 10 Most Dangerous Festivals, folks descend upon the tiny town of Rokugo to bash each other with 20 foot long bamboo poles. Requirements: Helmet? Check. Over 18? Check. Willingness to throw caution to the wind coupled with a fondness for alcohol? Check.

Hundreds of people flock to this testosterone fest to watch two teams beat the crap out of each other in 3 rounds. Helmets are ripped off. Bamboo poles bend and snap under the pressure. It’s an all out brawl. To make matters even more stupidly dangerous, the third round is fought around a bonfire, after everyone lights the flags on the end of their poles on fire.

Fire

My toes were frozen, and I didn’t care. The air was crackling first with anticipation, and then later with embers. A video taken in less than favorable lighting conditions is included below for your enjoyment:

Fight

After the fight, we were adopted by a local from Rokugo, otherwise known as my Drunken New Best Friend, who took us under her wing and straight to the only bar still open in town, where we downed a few beers and talked about how great we all were.

Towadako’s SNOW AND LIGHT FANTAVISTA

I had high hopes for this festival; it seemed to have everything: a grill your own food tent, snow sculptures, an ice bar, and fireworks. It was a fun way to spend an evening with friends, especially after a High Priority Mission in the area. But I think once was enough, and I wouldn’t make a big effort to see this one again. Maybe it was because we went on a Sunday night, but this festival seemed pretty dead… like a toned-down version of the Sapporo Snow Festival.

Oh, and did I mention that I just, much to my surprise, passed my Level 3 Japanese Proficiency Test?

Woohoo!

Last spring, we travelled to the nearest Big City, Sendai, for a Beck concert. During that trip we skipped over to the famous sightseeing destination Matsushima. While there, Steph snapped this moving shot of a Shinto procession carrying a shrine down the street:

Imagine our surprise when a few weeks ago, out of the blue, a gentleman named Maarten Reith from the Netherlands contacted us through our Flickr account. The Dutch city of Arnhem is playing host to an international sculpture exhibition called Sonsbeek 2008 in June, and the opening ceremonies for this exhibition will involve the sculptures being hand-carried throughout the city to their final destination in a public park. Sonsbeek’s procession was inspired by religious ceremonies such as this Shinto custom, and Mr. Reith was writing a newspaper article about the exhibition.

Now, not two weeks later, the article is published and Steph is famous! The photo is almost a full page and spans the center spread of De Gelderlander newspaper of January 24, 2008. Contratulations to Stephanie!

If you live in Japan and are employed in any capacity or belong to any social groups, you will most likely spend your entire December floating from one bounenkai to another. These “forget the year” parties mostly consist of sitting in a big tatami room, flitting from table to table and filling up people’s glasses with alcohol. I was thrilled when my adult English conversation class deviated from this time-honored standard and set up a night of karaoke instead.

Of course, December karaoke equals Christmas Songs galore. I usually kind of abhor carols, but something about being in Japan far away from home made them kind of nostalgic and appealing somehow.

To my surprise, the karaoke machine had a decent selection of Christmas music to choose from, including some Japanese holiday classics I’d never heard before. Over the course of the evening, I learned the following things:

• When asked to explain the whole Christmas story thing, I was informed that “manger” in the local dialect means “kitchen”… oddly enough, this misunderstanding didn’t detract from my description the whole nativity scene too much.
• You can make a grown Japanese woman cry actual tears by serenading her with “O Holy Night”
• We held a kind of informal gift exchange. I gave away some kitschy candles I brought from America which were baseball themed, shaped like bats and balls and gloves. Which is when I discovered that my students had never seen a candle shaped like anything other than a candle. It took me 4 tries to explain that they weren’t edible and that you’re supposed to light them on fire. (And this was with pictures of the things actually burning on the front of the package.)
• The karaoke machine does in fact have Handel’s Messiah, which makes for a rousing finale. Karaoke Handel has never been belted out with heartfelt operatic panache. Although I think we’ve now been banned from the karaoke bar.

There’s something really satisfying about celebrating your own holiday in a foreign country. Maybe not the ones where you usually spend time with your family, but the other ones where there’s lots of silly customs and games, those are fun. Take this Halloween, for example. Because I don’t live in the states, I am not subject to the grotesque advertising free-for-all that comes with any major holiday. I have the luxury of ignoring the commercial aspects, and celebrating if and when I want. Cut to this week’s eikaiwa class.

When I told everyone two weeks ago to come to class in costume (class was ON All Hallow’s Eve, after all), I totally thought everyone was going to blow me off. But my class of adults totally rallied, and arrived chalk full of Halloween spirit, complete with hokey rubber masks, treats, and pumpkin paraphernalia. Not being a big costumer myself, I took the easy way out and donned a sketchy santa outfit that was left in my house by some previous ALT. I got to class early, set up my freshly carved Jack O’ Lanterns, turned off the lights, and waited. One by one, my students trickled in… first they cautiously opened the door to find a dark classroom. Then they were bombarded with spooky noises from other students in the dark (egged on, of course, by me). We did the whole flashlight in the face bit. One by one, students joined the ranks and hid, waiting to surprise the next unsuspecting arrival. I was kind of shocked to discover how uniform the costumes were… every woman in my eikaiwa came dressed as a witch, with one creative exception. And the men? They uniformly dressed as…. nothing. Maybe they were charming gentleman callers. Whatever. They were equally game when the women cannibalized their costumes in order to include them in the fun. The first half hour of class was spent dispensing food and generally making a fuss… taking pictures, trading wigs, sitting on laps. You can see why we all love English so very very much.

Last Monday I arrived at my high school to discover with dismay that I was at the wrong school. It’s not so surprising actually. With 15 schools to visit, it’s a wonder I don’t make this mistake all the time. With one hour to regroup, I went home and began my planning for elementary school lessons. Raw ingredients for the day’s lessons included:

• my smallest school, with only 10 kids in the entire student body
• my voice, hoarse and almost inaudible, from a long and insistent cold

I racked my brain: with an hour’s notice, how could I finagle a day of successful lessons? And then it hit me: Of course! I would bring the pumpkins.

Living in Japan, it defies all expectation to have a hallway full of large orange gourds. As I learned last Halloween, pumpkins are remarkably scarce in Japan, at least the kind I grew up with in America. Last year, faced only with green, thin-skinned squash to carve, my English club instead opted to make Halloween origami. Creative, but slightly sacrilegious.

A month or two later, as the winter weather advanced and snow began to fall, I was not a little surprised to find an unusual care-package in my mailbox: pumpkin seeds from my father. Asking no questions about how these horticultural gems passed through customs, and knowing I would kill every last plant with my black thumb, I ferried these seeds off for a better life with a friend in the next town over. The seeds were then passed on again to some bemused and trusting farmers who promised to look after the little guys. And 5 months later, here we are, with pumpkins in my hallway, hiding from the rainy season, waiting for their moment to shine.

Enter stage left: Hikage Elementary. Pumpkins were the perfect answer for my little school: small classes would ensure that everyone could get their hands dirty, and a carving lesson would be gentle on my already failing voice. With this plan firmly in place, I arrived at Hikage (on time, thank you very much) to find a Song and Dance routine waiting for me:

Elementary Dance

After 45 minutes of entertaining the first graders (no knife oriented activities for you, kiddos!), we began pumpkin carving in earnest.

All my kids thought that fresh pumpkin was just about the nastiest thing they’d ever smelled. Some of my kids looked like they were going to pass out from the fumes. One of the joys of this lesson was watching the kids decide whose drawing to use for the jack o’ lantern face. Check out the whiteboard below:

Here we’ve got 3 different pumpkin drawings by the 5th and 6th graders. Instead of choosing their favorite drawing, they decided to make their final face by combining elements of everyone’s drawings: the unibrow from the drawing on the left, the eyes from the one in the middle, and the mouth from the one on the right. The end result is circled in red. A brilliant demonstration of group dynamics in Japan. And it made for not a bad Jack o’ lantern either.

The day went really smoothly and we all had a great time. Sadly, I discovered that this particular school is closing in March due to low student attendance. Sad, because Hikage Elementary (which poetically translates to, as far as I can tell, “school of the sun’s shade”) is a forgotten and overlooked gem on the very outskirts of Noshiro.

Take for example the principal, who makes drawings every month, incredibly detailed drawings which illustrate everything that happened at school in those 30 days. The drawings include the staff and children, and the faces are left blank, so that everyone can draw-in their own expression. Scenes vary from harvesting sweet potatoes to the school festival to field trips to see robots. At the end of the year, these pictures are bound into a book and given to the graduating students. This intimacy and level of personal attention will certainly be lacking wherever they end up next year. I’m sure my students will quickly adjust to their new, larger schools this spring. Schools where class sizes of 30 or 40 students make it impossible to do hands-on lessons like pumpkin carving. I’m glad I got this one last opportunity to hang out with these kids as a group, and and take advantage of the school’s small size to do something special for our last lesson, before the students are scattered to the winds. Carving pumpkins together was the perfect way to achieve closure. Best of luck next year, everyone!