I literally just returned from my two-week trip to Boston and Buffalo, and moments after sitting down at the computer… another earthquake! The epicenter was in the same prefecture, Iwate, as the previous big one about a month ago. Poor Iwate.
This one was a little scary because this time, Stephanie wasn’t here in Akita. She and our friend Andy took a road trip to Aomori, and were located much closer to the epicenter than Noshiro. (They are in the armpit of the large axe-shaped peninsula at the top of the island.) Not to worry though; Steph called and assured me everything is all right.
I should also mention that there was a big one in the same region, but a ways off shore, just last week! That makes three in just over a month, all about the same 7-ish magnitude. Definitely some major correction going on in the earth’s crust around eastern Tohoku.
This (not my photo; thanks, Flickr!) is what appeared on the TV screen several seconds before the earthquake arrived in Noshiro this morning. Note that the blue overlay is not part of the newscast, but pops up over whatever show is currently on. This particular warning is from an aftershock about half an hour after the main quake, so at this point everybody was already watching the news.
Seismic sensors are placed all over the country, and immediately upon the occurrence of the first shock, the epicenter is calculated and warnings go up on TV stations immediately. Since the shock waves take time to spread from the epicenter through the ground, the warning will hit the TV before the quake arrives in most places. Impressive stuff.
I have a fascination this one question, and lately I’ve been asking everyone within earshot: What was your first job? Sometimes this leads to cryptic two-word answers for which you must invent your own back-story (take for example “cookie factory”). Other times you get more information than you were bargaining for (”I mowed lawns so I could buy my first set of bagpipes”).
With my eikaiwa class, this simple question yielded a two hour discussion that shed light not only on the lives of my more <*ahem*> mature students, but also on the economic landscape of country life in Japan.
Their answers included:
Counting cars. The employee sat by the side of the road with a manual counter in each hand, as part of a feasibility study for building a new street.
Cold-calling people to ask for their support of a particular political candidate.
But my personal favorite was assistant driver. Why? Because apparently this job required no actual driving. Nor did it require navigation or keeping the driver alert. After some prodding, we finally got the whole story. Akita, a region famous for rice, produces a lot of rice chaff. In order to make use of this byproduct, the chaff was driven up to Aomori (a region famous for apples), where my student unloaded bags of the stuff. Fruit was then packed in this chaff, and shipped back to Akita, thus creating a perfectly balanced cycle of commerce.
I’m not sure what they did with the apple cores. But my first guess?
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!
NOSHIRO, Japan — The only outward sign of conflict here is the red flags of protest, but this small logging city on Japan’s remote northern coast is seething.
A proliferation of national chain stores outside town has already forced the closing of about half of the city’s once teeming central shopping district. Now, many in this normally restrained rural community see the megamall being built nearby, by a company based near Tokyo, as the final nail in the coffin of their economy. read more
It doesn’t make Noshiro sound very nice, but the depiction of empty lots and shuttered stores is sadly true. We’ve learned to ignore these things and just accept that this is what a medium-size town looks like in Japan; all the similar-sized towns we have visited are in the same state. On the other hand, restaurants and nighttime hangouts seem immune to these problems, and Noshiro is blessed with many wonderful, warm and bustling eateries (and people!) that are probably the #1 thing we love about the town.
We have heard rumors of this new Supercenter that Aeon wants to build east of town. But generally, people don’t talk to us about these kinds of things, probably because of the language barrier. While it would be nice to have a huge mall nearby (we currently have to drive an hour to get certain groceries), I agree with the townspeople quoted in this article that it would probably be the last nail in the coffin for the downtown business district. There’s already a big department store right in the middle of town (JUSCO, you can see it in the picture above) which is probably responsible for shutting down most of the small stores on that street. Putting a bigger one outside of town might even kill that downtown JUSCO, which would be doubly terrible, leaving the main central shopping street almost completely useless.
Thanks again to John for forwarding that article to me. Amazing to see our very own “shopping street” (our name for it; the real name is 柳町, Yanagimachi, “willow town”) on the pages of the NYT.
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:
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!
I didn’t hear about the southern-California wildfires until my mom told me about them on the phone yesterday. Since then I’ve been riveted by the Flickr community’s photos that are constantly being uploaded by photographers all over the region.
You can get an idea of the scale of this thing from this map from KPBS.
The amazing thing is that this map covers as much area as the entire prefecture that we live in in Japan.
It’s deja vu all over again. We lived in San Diego for four years before moving to Japan, and the fire pictures are taking us back to 2003 when some of the same areas burned at almost exactly the same dates, starting on October 26 and continuing for several days after.
Our thoughts are with our friends in San Diego, particularly John and Kathie who live directly between the north and south fires.
I’ve been coaching a high school student for a speech contest (which she won, incidentally). She was really nervous the day before the contest. To calm her nerves, another teacher suggested that she imagine that everyone in the audience was a potato or a pumpkin. This advice, “Minna wa jagaimo”, is apparently de rigeur when trying to calm public speakers. I told my co-teacher that our old stand-by is to imagine everyone in the audience in their underwear. I don’t think this American version was translated for my student’s benefit.
The Big Chill
I’ve been doing mini-lessons on Halloween, explaining why we wear costumes, and why we make Jack O’Lanterns. During one of these lessons, I learned people go to haunted houses in Japan also, though it is a summer activity, because being scared cools the body. I can see a certain logic there, I suppose, but autumn will always be haunted house time for me.
Piping Hot
Many of the onsens around Akita are located in mountainous areas. These ups and downs can be really hazardous to negotiate in the winter with ice on the road. However, wintertime is exactly when you want to take a nice long dip on an onsen. The solution? Pipe onsen water under the roads to keep them ice free. Efficient and brilliant. Here’s a cross section of road with all the tubes for water:
Oishii, yo!
While driving through the ken, we stumbled onto a little pullout by the side of the road, which was absolutely brimming with trucks. We pulled over to see what the hubbub was about, and found people enthusiastically filling huge jugs with the water pouring out of a pipe from the mountain. Empty bottles were provided nearby for a small fee. People were hauling away this water by the truckload. Apparently this particular source of water was praised by some writer, and ever since, people have flocked to this spot. With assurances of “oishii, yo!”, I filled up one of my own bottles for a sample. I must not have a very sensitive palate, because I tasted nothing. Or perhaps that is the very embodiment of delicious water.
When we moved to Noshiro, we were “thrilled” to find that our otherwise wonderful house included two ancient rusty car hulks in the front yard. You may remember them from such photographs as “Our House”:
According to Nate, Steph’s predecessor, they had been there when he’d moved in three years before.
Well, last week, a couple guys showed up at our front door and asked me if those cars were mine. “Heck no,” I said in my best Japanese, “but I can take you to the person who knows.” I showed them to our landlord who lives in one of the blue shacks next door. I left them to it and surreptitiously watched out a window as they gestured and yakked around the cars. The guys got in their souped-up spoilered window-tinted pimpmobile and went on their way.
I didn’t really expect that they would actually return for the hulks. But my lack of faith, disturbing or otherwise, was rewarded today when a crane truck backed into the driveway right up next to the cars. Open the gates, Peter, they’re a-comin’ home!
Now they are gone and a whole new world of landscaping opportunities (and parking places!) has opened before us. We might need to have a bring-your-own-car party just to see how many we can fit out there. It’s still not Andy’s driveway, but we’re catching up!
P.S. I was amused to note that a pine sapling about two feet high had grown between the cars.
