About a week ago, Chris and I returned from a 9-day visit to Okinawa. Instead of outright telling you about the complex awesomeness of the place, let’s see if our new vocabulary gleaned from the trip paints a vivid enough picture.
But several other general-use words adhered themselves to my long-term memory as a consequence of the trip, including: hade (gaudy), kaesu (to return, as in a car), yakeshimashita (sunburned), kokusai (international), suizokukan (aquarium), yatai (a food stall without walls), yakimono (pottery), ei (ray), haka (grave) and jietai (soldier in Japan’s self-defense force).
Create a mosaic in your mind’s eye with that vocabulary (and these pictures), and we’ll return soon to provide the narrative.
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:
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. ↩
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!
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.
Some of you may have heard that we have made some inroads in the music/performance community here, after a year of looking in from the outside.
A month or two ago, our friend and fellow Noshiro ALT Frank discovered and introduced us to a taiko drumming group, Noshiro Belabo Taiko (能代べらぼ太鼓). We (and I in particular) had been dithering about joining a similar group in the neighboring town of Futatsui, unaware that there was one right in our own back yard. The group is a great deal of fun, consisting in roughly equal quantities of adults and elementary/junior high kids.
After all of two rehearsals, we were informed we’d be performing at a small town festival the following weekend. Since then we’ve been in no less than three performances (albeit playing with the kids), which always tickles the announcers who love shoving microphones in our faces and asking us where we’re from.
We don’t have any taiko videos yet, so for the moment you can get an idea from this photo from our friend Andy:
Almost immediately after starting taiko, Steph fulfilled her year-long dream and got the opportunity to join a Yosakoi dance team. In the apparent tradition of Japanese performing groups, they threw her into a performance after but two rehearsals. Here they are performing (in the rain) at the pre-Futatsui Marathon festival (5-minute video; might take a minute to load):
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.
I discovered this delightful public-service announcement posted over the urinals in the bathroom of a visitor center on the slopes of Mount Chokai in the south end of Akita. It says “please take one more step forward.” Or in the words of our friend Andy: “You’re not as close as you think you are.”
We passed this wonderful advertisement (?) in the city of Sakata, Yamagata. Unfortunately the building it was attached to was closed, so we never got to try this mysterious “blue soup”.
The text says “Kyuusai Blue Soup” and the speech bubbles above the guy’s head say “one more cup!” and “tastes terrible.” We never figured out if this was an actual product or just an elaborate joke.
