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.

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.

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.

Earthquake Early Warnings, originally uploaded by miyagawa.

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.

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

Cutie Honey - Koda Kumi
Ah, my very first JPop song. Cutie Honey is a character who appears in lots of manga and anime, and this is her theme song! Her prominent characteristic is that she gets “busty” whenever she’s in crime-fighting mode, and the lyrics to “Cutie Honey” describe the salient features of her body. This version is by Koda Kumi, who is, as far as I can tell, the Britney Spears of Japan: void of socially redeeming features and total eye candy. The video for this song actually grooves pretty effortlessly, and has an English translation of the lyrics as well as romaji.

Word to the wise: let it download completely before you start watching.

Cutie Honey’s contribution to my knowledge of Japanese includes:

• Verbs for sappy love songs
  傷つける (to wound, hurt someone’s feelings)
  見つめる (to stare intently)
  追いかける (to chase after/pursue someone)
  近寄よる(to approach/draw near)

• Japanese onomatopoeia:
  チュクチュク(beating heart)
  ヒクヒク (twitching nose)
  シクシク (sound of sobbing)

アゲ♂アゲ♂EVERY☆騎士 - DJ OZMA
Ok, I have no idea what is up with the title to this song, thus I always have to get my Japanese friends to reluctantly punch this one into the karaoke machine. For the sake of clarity, I’m just going to refer to this gem as “Every Night”, because that’s the phrase that’s going to be burned indelibly into your consciousness by the end of the song.

I’m a little ashamed to put DJ Ozma up here… he seems a little trashy, and I always get a few eye rolls when I queue this one up. But you can’t deny it… the song is catchy and mesmerizing. There’s a fair bit of English in this song (it even kind of makes sense!) which is balanced out by some ridiculously fast Japanese phrases.

The video is worth it just to see Ozma’s hair at the end, which is kind of like a blonde afro. Did I also mention that he’s wearing a white leisure suit? The mood in this video strikes a weird balance between raw sexuality and the kum-ba-ya-ishness of summer camp. Some of the dance moves are also ludicrously outdated, as are the women crawling earnestly all over Ozma

In addition to being endlessly amusing, DJ Ozma taught me some basic PG-13 vocabulary that has for some reason escaped me up to this point, such as:

唇 (lips)
狂う (to go crazy, ie. dancing like crazy)
出鱈目 (bullshit, nonsense)
裸 (naked)

Kiss and Cry -宇多田ヒカル
Utada Hikaru’s a pretty big name and has been for about 10 years now. I’m told by my Japanese friends that her lyrics are beautifully crafted and “read like poetry”. No music video for this one yet as far as I can tell, so you’re going to have to settle for this odd pairing with anime.

More good sappy love song vocab here, including:
近づく (to approach, get closer)
誘う (to lure, seduce)
共犯 (complicity)
and my personal favorite, 弱虫, which translates directly as “weak insect” and means “coward”.

The song also features fun Japanese-English phrases like “high tension” (said of a person), “critical hit” (to the heart), “resutora” (corporate restructuring), and “donto-uori-beibe” (Don’t worry baby), which is mysteriously inflected with katakana, even though the singer is fluent in English.

Extra points to Utada Hikaru for effortlessly working “Nisshin Cup O’Noodle” into her song.

Choo Choo Train - Exile
My students are all bugging me to learn a song by Exile. They’re kind of boy-band-ish for my tastes, and thus I’ve been resisting. But two weeks ago I started teaching American pop music to my English club at school, so in the name of reciprocity, I’m kind of at their mercy.

This particular song seems to have more English in it than 日本語. The lyrics don’t seem to make much sense in either language, which makes the song kind of useless for studying Japanese. But it’s fun, if formulaic. Choo Choo train is easy enough to learn, and if it gets me some cred with my students, it’s the least I can do. Literally.

Let’s just call this one a pop-culture lesson and leave it at that. I wish I could show you the breezy fun video of boy candy running along railroad tracks, but alas, the copyright watchdogs in Japan are FIERCE!

Anytime - Crystal Kay
Crystal Kay has this intoxicating cultural background that is rare in Japan. The upshot of this is that she is fluent in Japanese and English and is an excellent R&B singer to boot.

am 11:00 - HY
Should I ever master this song, I want a lifetime achievement award. This song lies right on the boundary of the possible for me and the Japanese skills I currently own. It’s full of crazy articulate vocabulary, but more intimidating than that is that the second half of the song is rap. However, am 11:00 has endeared itself to me, and I find myself oddly drawn to the whole Japanese rap thing. The music video is sweet and earnest and fun and isn’t trying too hard to be cool or foreign or sexy, which is saying a lot in the world of J-Pop. Plus I love that I get to sing the non-sequitur “Let’s go to hunny’s house” right smack dab in the middle of the song.

If anyone out there knows of more singable JPop, please pass it my way!
After all, I have a big test to study for.

Ever since passing level 3 of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT) last December, I’ve been preparing for the next level up. A passing grade on level 2 declares you competent enough in Japanese to pursue employment at a Japanese company. The intimidating truth of the matter is that it’s a huge leap up from where I was last December. Passing this test is going to take some serious study mojo.

I started with the fun bit and learned the additional 700 kanji necessary for level 2. When I finished at the beginning of April, I had to face the ugly truth that kanji alone wouldn’t do the job. I was going to have to start seriously digging in to vocabulary and grammar as well.

I’ll try and spare you the nitty-gritty details of my day-to-day studies, how I’m mining the WWWJDIC for sentences to put into my SRS, and slogging through gobi and particles and keigo. An extra 3+ hours of this kind of work every day leaves my brain in a mush-like state which is inconducive to writing. However, it’s not all grunt-work. I took some advice from folks who’ve achieved fluency, and they testify that the best study technique is the one that’s fun, the one that incorporates Japanese into your life sneakily, on a daily basis. To this end, I’ve been reading children’s stories and manga and… here’s the kicker… listening almost exclusively to Japanese music.

When I came to Japan, lots of people told me that they first gained their enthusiasm for English by listening to Beatles songs. I was kind of skeptical about the Beatles School of ESL… I mean how far is “Let it be” going to get you in every-day conversation? But ever since I started studying J-Pop a few months ago, I no longer doubt. I have been, in-fact, completely converted.

Learning Japanese through music is such an obvious method for me I can’t believe I didn’t try this sooner. I spent a good chunk of the 4 years preceding my life in Akita poring over sheet music and memorizing songs in Italian, French, German, Hebrew, and Russian. Granted, those classical songs I studied were mostly in romance languages, and I only had to learn the gist of what I was singing, but the groundwork is still there. Sitting down to learn a Japanese song now seems like second-nature.

The beautiful thing about karaoke is that it’s waaaaaay less stressful than any voice recital. Ample performance opportunities and a forgiving audience both make for excellent incentive. And I can’t argue with the results: things seem to be gelling, albeit slowly.

If only they’d let me take the test this December with a microphone in my hand instead of a pencil.

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.

office furniture in Bulgaria

• Correcting tests for cram school students
• Driving patients home from the hospital

компютриoffice furniture in Bulgaria

• 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?

Composting them into fertilizer to grow rice.

Little did I know that in order to understand Ryukyuan culture today, you can’t not learn about WWII and its effect on this little island. This reality hit me smack in the face when, after about an hour on the island, my new friend and cultural guide Tsugiko informed me that her mother had been a victim and castaway as a consequence of a US ship bombing a boat full of kids. Floored as I was by this information (”Um. I’m sorry… nice to meet you?”) it became a familiar story as I spent more and more time with Tsugiko, and asked her to elaborate on the details.

Just before the invasion of Okinawa, in 1944, it was decided to… export?… school children and old people who were too young or infirm to fight. These people were sent off in boats destined for somewhere safe, like mainland Japan. Tsugiko’s mother was a 9 year old schoolgirl on one of these boats, the Tsushima-maru.

Very few survived the sinking of the boat, but Tsugiko’s mother was one of the lucky few who found something to cling to on the rough seas (there was also a typhoon passing through; had I mentioned that?). She and her raftmates floated on the open sea for a week before drifting to one of the many uninhabited islands in the Okinawan archipelago. Once on land again, the castaways had trouble finding fresh water on such a small island. Tsugiko’s mother, who had grown up in a sparsely populated part of the island, knew how and where to find water by digging under the sand.

After flagging down a passing fisherman, these survivors were able to return to Okinawa, only to go into hiding as the American invasion began. Because more boats were leaving with other evacuees, the survivors were forbidden to share their story as a matter of national security.

Wow.

These days Okinawa is pretty distinctly demarcated. The war memorials tend to be in the south, where a majority of the Ryukyuan populace live. The center of the island is filled with Americans as this is where a majority of the US military bases are located. And the northern part of the island is mountainous and wild with greenery. Life up there is rugged, rural, and sparsely populated.

Tsugiko described how the populated south and the sparsely populated north played out during the war. Japanese soldiers from the mainland concentrated their numbers in Southern Okinawa, as this is where they expected US soldiers to land. They were wrong. American soldiers came from the middle of this long thin island, and sent separate forces north and south to conquer the island. The American soldiers who went to the north found mostly farm folk and secured that land quickly and with relatively little bloodshed. But to the south… here there was a dangerous concentration of Japanese soldiers, as well as Ryukyuan civilians. The Japanese war ethic is to never give up, never surrender, and the native Ryukyuan populace were browbeaten with this ideology as well. This led to an extensive and bloody battle, as both Japanese soldiers and Ryukyuan civilians were driven farther and farther south. People jumped off the cliffs on the southern edge of the island, because they had nowhere else to go, and they believed surrender to be inexcusable. Tsugiko says that accounts of the battle describe so many ships on the sea, that it seemed possible to walk across from boat deck to boat deck all the way to China. Think about that image for a second.

Chris and I found ourselves in southern Okinawa after this history lesson, and we decided to check out the peace park on the cliffs that memorializes all who died as a consequence of that battle.

The most publicized aspect of the park is a huge memorial, the Cornerstone of Peace, which strives to list and acknowledge everyone who died in the Battle of Okinawa, regardless of country of origin or status (soldier or civilian). Reflective black stones swimming in kanji stair-step across a large field, order in tribute to chaos. Another section of the park contains memorials from every prefecture in Japan and then some. Over 50 monuments form a huge graveyard of sorts, a testimonial to the loss of battle.

We wandered over to the cliffs. I imagined people throwing themselves off these cliffs, onto the jagged rocks below, into the waves dashing themselves against the rough stone.

We found an unpublicized fissure in the rock, huge, several stories tall, several feet wide. Whether this was done naturally, through the force of an explosion, or the force of tourism, I don’t know. We progressed through the overgrowth, amongst roughly shattered rocks down to the coast below. The water, while crystalline and blue around other parts of the island, was stagnant here in parts, slimy and green in others. As if this place itself has a rotten memory that it’s still trying to purge.

Or perhaps that’s just my imagination.

As Tsugiko drove us around Okinawa, a flood of stories continued to issue forth from her, as every cave and boulder seemed to have a story behind it.

Here is a cave where Ryukyuan people collected together, hid in fear. These people were convinced that they had to kill themselves if the American army drew near. One man among them, however, had studied abroad in Hawaii, had met Americans, and could personally testify that Americans were not unknowable demons, but were people who would understand their humanitarian plight. He went out to negotiate with the soldiers when they came, with the English he had procured during his studies in Hawaii. That was a lucky group, a group who lived.

Very nearby was another cave, in similar circumstances, with civilians huddled, ready to kill themselves as soldiers approached. This group did not contain a world traveler with stories of understanding abroad. This group died.

You know, sometimes we JETs, we pooh-pooh the internationalization aspect of our job. How important is it really that I brought enchiladas or Ghanaian dance to the people of Noshiro? And then I hear a story like this. I can only hope one day to be that foreigner that some random person met, that person who, through personal experience, demonstrates that Foreign isn’t scary or evil or inaccessible. Foreign is closer and more knowable than any of us realize.

That’s my purpose. That’s why I’m here.

Of course, there’s all the uniquely Okinawan things you’ll find there: umibudou, awamori, chanpuru, gusuku, ryukyu, utaki, tebichi, habu, togyu, sanshin, bashofu, bingata, mozuku, rafute, beniimo, eisa and shisa.

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.