Chain Letters Home

Doing Lunch

2007-08-08T03:04:00.000-04:00

Since we're so very near the end (I fly on the 14th, and arrive back at DTW on the 16th), my office decided that today would be a beautiful day to take me out to lunch. We all piled in the 3/4 ton Truck of Justice (a Ford Ranger pickup that ferries me about the countryside when I get out into the provinces to Do Good- or Interview People and Bug The Authorities) and rode across the Friendship Bridge to a little restaurant packed behind a series of row houses on the western bank of the Mekong river. That area, across the bridge (reconstructed by the Japanese after its destruction at the end of the Khmer Rouge era) is a bit of a boomtown now, and you can look one direction and see endless rice fields and sugar palms, and look the other and see high-rise hotels. We picked something in-between; a restaurant built on a slightly shaky wooden platform overhanging the riverbank.

There, my program manager and I engaged in that age-old game of West vs. East: The Weird Stuff You Eat game. We traded back and forth blow-for-blow; I was holding my own with reports on whale, raw horse, tarantula and other deliciously odd foods (yeah, tarantula. Cambodian delicacy. Tastes like almost nothing, like a big old ball of tapioca in a crispy shell) and my boss fired right back with crickets, bees, sashimi, and hot dogs. Then he got a grin on his face, and decided to press his hand.

"Have you eaten rat?"

Whoa, whoa, buddy. Rat? I most certainly have not. I have no intention. Have you?

"Yes. During Pol Pot regime, I eat."

The conversation had gone from laughably light to uncomfortably heavy, and he let it hang in the air for a moment before continuing.

"The rat that lives near people, in the village, it tastes horrible. But the rat in the fields, very good."

Without really knowing what to do next, I nodded, agreeing that a free-range rat probably beat a city rat any day. The boss went on.

"One day, I came home and my father had cooked a soup- like a curry, like amok (fish in coconut curry), but with a different taste. It was delicious! After dinner, we all were sitting around enjoying the last of the meal, and he got a kind of a smile on his face. He asked me if I knew what kind of meat it was in the curry. I guessed beef. Maybe he was lucky, bought some cow. He shook his head, and asked me if I knew where my dog was. He fed me my dog. It got sick, and started to attack people, so he killed it; and when it was dead, he couldn't waste all that meat."

Everyone over 30 survived the genocide somehow. It's hard to wrap my brain around that, sometimes. There are a lot of these moments here, where the reality of what happened rises up and makes itself impossible to ignore.

Then the boss laughed. "So you really ate raw horse? Was it good?"

pax

DWF

2007-08-03T03:47:00.000-04:00

Driving While Foreign.

Yep, yours truly got picked up by the police today at lunch. I was rolling along in a pack of motos on my way to lunch when a police officer stuck out his orange baton and waved me to the side of the road. "Stop sir. You pay money."

Before this becomes a tirade against the police, it's important to mention:

Cambodian police are perhaps the most underpaid and least appreciated police force in the world. They get 30 bucks a month with no medical, dental, retirement or other benefits. They have to buy their own uniforms and equipment. Training's a joke, and nearly none of them have had formal education as to what the laws they're enforcing mean; and law in Cambodia is fluid enough that the laws they were taught are likely no longer in effect. So they supplement their income where they can.

Like shaking foreigners down for cash.

Despite my best efforts to play dumb, my constant smile and my willingness to participate in whatever Kafkaesque procedures they had on offer, Phnom Penh's Finest's final demand was clear and unavoidable. "5 dollars."

Why?

"Barang."

On the upside, work's been great. I'm preparing reports, I've finished up most my assignments, and there's very little between me and a completed summer internship.

I hit the airport on the 14th- almost no time now.

It's not unusual. Not in the least.

2007-07-12T05:02:00.000-04:00

Ladies and gentlemen, I not only will keep my promise to post once a week, but I will bring enlightenment.

First, watch this. I know, I know, youtube is a tool of the patriarchy, but watch it.

Second, think of how cool it would be to see him live.

That's tonight. I've once before journeyed to the far off (just up the street) superclassy (8 dollar water!) land of the Cambodiana Hotel to see the one, the only Asian Tom Jones. He plays each night except Tuesday, and I assure you his show is just terrifying enough to be wonderful.

Next Episode: Stories From The Provinces.

It's been a month...

2007-07-06T00:01:00.000-04:00

And in the interests of everyone not thinking I've forgotten about them, here's a quick update from the front:

1. Cambodia is amazing.
2. Work is similarly amazing, though heartbreaking. Not much can be said about it until I leave the country, but I promise a tell-all (tell-most (tell-some)) report when I get back.
3. I just got back from a trip to Angkor Wat and the rest of the big abandoned temples of the north, and I've got pictures- like all the hip kids, I've decided to eschew blogger's clunky picture-hosting and posting for my very own flickr pool, andrew's never home. I know, I know, one more thing to check- but if it's there, I promise that things (usually cool things that I see around) will end up in it- and it's a whole lot faster, which was the real concern during the big silence here on Radio Free Chainletter.

The internet around here is difficult at best to access- there are internet cafes, but they cost monies (considerable monies, depending on which one you wander into) and they don't exist in number or convenience out in the provinces, which is where I've been spending and will be spending a lot of time.

Right now, I'm interviewing judges, prison guards, police investigators, prison chiefs and prisoners as ground-level primary research on pretrial detention and torture in Cambodia. Fun, uplifting stuff- but it means that me and my backpack are spending a lot of time rumbling around the boondocks of Cambodia in pickup trucks, taxis, big share buses and motorbikes. It's a good time, and there are a lot of things I'm writing down in little word documents to be disclosed later if it still seems like a good idea to disclose; but believe me when I say that free speech is more an ideal around here than a reality.

There will, whether I think it's a wise idea or not, be an update to this thing in one week or less. I promise.

pax

Living in Cambo-di-a

2007-06-07T21:58:00.000-04:00

with apologies to James Brown, may he rest in peace

Things are finally settled and secure here in Phnom Penh- I have a place to stay, I have my trusty motorbike, and I have my job. I've spent a regretfully short time out and about lately; househunting here is a full-time job, as the realtors are less than helpful, leaving the savvy traveler to contact a tuktuk driver and ask him where the best spots are. Said driver calls his friends, his relatives, his sister's roommates' mother's ex-fiancee, and his fellow tuktuk guys and then careens said savvy traveler around the city at a breakneck pace, showing apartment after apartment and leaving you to stand awkwardly next to some no-english-speaking homeowner who wants very desperately for you to live upstairs and make use of those rooms nobody's in right now.

So after a few days of all that, we (the intern trio) looked in our trusty Lonely Planet and found a guesthouse cheap enough to rent by the month and live in clean, safe, and utterly tiny style. I sleep in a closet. It's a closet with a bed in it, sure, but it's still a little petite. Intimate. Seven feet by seven feet, with a double bed that occupies 9/10ths of the room and a fan on the wall. On the upside, there's a little cafe downstairs, an internet room enclosed in mosquito netting up an entirely different set of stairs, and a cool lounging-sitting area. It's actually pretty nice, so long as the bedroom is conceptualized as a place one only goes when one is good and ready to sleep. It's in a great location- on the riverfront, not far from all the cute little restaurants, the Royal Palace, the Silver Pagoda, and the like- I'll post pictures when I finally find a power converter with which to charge my batteries.

I haven't really gotten out to see anything (which is convenient, as I lack the camera to record it), but just tooling around town is crazy and interesting enough to sate my taste for adventure for awhile. Driving in Phnom Penh is a little like throwing yourself into a pool of bees and wading with the current. No matter how weird things are over here, though, I'm proud to say my home state of Michigan has managed to very securely rise to the top of the weirdness scale.

This weekend (here, it's Friday morning), I'm thinking of taking a depressing day and going to The Killing Fields and Tuol Sleng (the Genocide Museum), to get my history lesson out of the way, and maybe lift my spirits back up at the Palace, the Pagoda, and the National Museum (which is a craaaazy place- rumor has it that in the evening at sunset, a mad flock of bats dives out of the eaves of the Museum (as the roof is one of those triangular open-construction deals) and goes out on patrol; the largest population of bats inhabiting an artificial structure in the world. If I go, I'll get pictures. It'll be like Batman) and, you know, balance the whole horrific terror with some reassurance that the world has come back to normal after Pol Pot.

But that's just the plan. I'm sure it'll change.

We went to a birthday party last week- one of the lawyers on the Juvenile Unit's son was turning two. I have never seen such a giant production for a two-year old. Happy Birthday was sung (by a karaoke machine) in no fewer than seven languages in a row; they got sick of it during the Cantonese version and shut it off to cut the cake. There were easily a hundred people there, each sitting at tables in a rapid-constructo party tent that filled the entire street on the block that the lawyer lived on. The tent was framed on either end by big plyboard mockups of Angkorian temples, and the food...

My fascination with the weird stuff people eat for fun may have met its match in the Cambodian diet. The meal was served Chinese-style, with big plates on a Lazy Susan that you'd just pick from whenever you felt like eating and put the food of choice in your personal bowl... in theory. In practice, the entire meal was a "I dare you to try..." game, in which each person ladled the weirdest thing they could find on the table into the bowl of the person next to them. Foreigner and Khmer alike tossed weird foods (fish gill, fish eye, fish brain, century eggs, pig ear...) into the neighboring bowl with a short laugh, like "Hey, man. Betcha can't eat this!" and everyone seemed thrilled whenever their "gift" was consumed.

Throughout the dinner, since we did happen to be in a tropical paradise, the furnishing of ice was an event of great ceremony. Guys with icebuckets and tongs prowled the party tent, and any time your glass's level dipped below the brim they'd shove the biggest chunk of ice they could in there. Should a spill event almost happen, they'd take the ice back out and put it right back in the bucket. No judgment, here, just pure reporting.

NEW FEATURE: Watch this space for regular updates on our new column...

This morning on the way to work, I nearly hit:

Schoolkids (on foot, bike, and moto), Monks (same), worker guys (in motos, motos with trailers, cyclos, handcarts, and random pieces of steel slung over their shoulder), tuktuks, oxen, A GIANT TOAD, a mack truck, a big construction truck full of bricks with guys sitting on the top of the cab AND on top of the bricks as they drove along, half the Khmer army...

The giant toad was the most startling. It was the size of a dinner plate, and looked angry.

Elsewhere

2007-06-01T03:03:00.000-04:00

In Phnom Penh now- it's 2 pm local time, but I'm really not even sure what day it is. I'm camped out in a little internet cafe, tapping out a few quick emails and generally being the least exciting traveler there is.

Adventure happens tomorrow. Today, staying awake until nightfall is proving to be a challenge.

Shipping Out

2007-05-28T15:38:00.000-04:00

It's been awhile. I'll fill you in on the necessaries real quick:

1. Law school is incredibly interesting in the doing, but perhaps not so much in the telling. I wake up, I read, I eat, I read, I go to class, I read, I sleep.

2. What is interesting in the telling is the stuff that comes out of law school. The Law School Rock Band, TJ Hooper and the Learned Hands (a lame joke-name from this case) practices every Tuesday. I'll fill you in on concert schedules when we book a gig.

3. My year of school is now officially over- I've survived. Now, finally (in list item three, no less!) I can get to the point: The blog is back online. I've got some interesting adventures planned, and I can no longer keep them under my hat.

In two days, I fly out to Phnom Penh, Cambodia, to work for these guys. I'm one of three student interns with this NGO, and I'll be working with the Juvenile Litigation Project. This relates, a little bit, to point 2 above- seems there are a lot of other optimistic rock-star humanitarian types around.

The trip lasts from May 30th to August 15th, and I'll be posting pictures and snippets here periodically to keep everyone updated.

Two days!

A Jurisdiction Near You

2007-01-22T00:31:00.000-05:00

So there's a rumour going around on the Law School listservers about a band- a rock band, starting here, at my own little law school. I'm not gonna say I've got nothing to do with it. Those of you interested in rocking, or the semblance of rocking, should check out the wiki here.
The band is currently recruiting, and it might be a little while before you hear from them, but if by chance you read this, you're on notice and you'll probably be tapped to come to the first show.

Love Letter to Nino

2006-10-18T21:09:00.000-04:00

Just got back from the ACLU conference in Washington, D.C. I will make no political statements on this blog, but I must share with you an awesome occurrence:

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia came to the conference. I've got nothing but respect for this man, no matter how strange his rulings, no matter how off-the-wall his conclusions. He's a genius.

So when I heard he was going to debate Nadine Strossen on Sunday night, I was, of course, thrilled. Geeky thrill morphed into mild surprise when they decided that they were going to be on a first-name basis for the duration of the debate. Mild surprise turned into jaw-dropping shock when I found out that "first name basis" meant that Nadine would be spending the evening calling him "Nino."

Nino. The man whose opinions pop up in my casebooks with a regularity usually reserved for clocks and celestial bodies, Senior Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia... Nino.
Antonin "Your Living Constitution is Bunk" Scalia was this weekend reduced to two syllables and suddenly made human.

Well, the name half did it. The other half was his patent admission that a bunch of rich old lawyers sitting in a panel is a ridiculous court of last resort for our country. But hey, that's for another time.

pax

Long Train Running

2006-09-06T16:43:00.000-04:00

So I'm not really still stuck in Denver.

It's much less interesting than that. I'm back from my Grand Japan Adventure, I spent a month procrastinating and not wanting to tell you all that it was over, and now I've run clean out of excuses. I'll post the pictures from Korea as soon as I receive them- I'm still waiting on those- but in the meantime:

I'm now enrolled in the University of Michigan School of Law. Took my first classes yesterday, and I've got maybe ten minutes right now to get a blog post off before going back into the books and continuing to slavishly cram legal information into my skull. Law school is hard, and weird, and fun, and very, very different from anything I've done before. Not so interesting to write about, but there you have it. I'll post pictures of this place, too, as soon as I take some- but those of you who are really DYING to see what a law school looks like could just bop over to the official site and poke around.

It's kind of surreal and classy- in a very strange, stepped-back-in-time kind of way. I'm sitting in the lobby right now, tapping away at my laptop, while a classmate practices on the baby grand piano next to me and people out in the quad toss the football around. I keep waiting for them to issue the monocles and brandy snifters, but I don't think that happens until you're a second-year student.

pax

D is for Denver!

2006-08-02T18:17:00.000-04:00

I'm camped out in Denver, siphoning some stolen power from an unattended walljack and transmitting on the (unsecured! Ha! Information wants to be free!) wireless network. I haven't slept in over 26 hours now, and I don't have any intent to chnage that until I've arrived in Detroit, and found my bed- this being, of course, my genius anti-jetlag plan. I'll be so dead that my body won't know which way is up! Take that, biology!

So it seems I've got some time. My flight boards at 5:55 PM, and it's 4:15 local time. In my head, it's 7:16 AM. I don't know whether I'm gaining a day, losing a day, trading a day, investing it... whatever. What I do know is that I can overhear conversations in English, and it's slowly driving me mad. With Japanese, I could turn off my understanding when I didn't want to listen to people. Korean, I never understood in the first place. But English... I've only heard English when people are talking DIRECTLY TO ME over this past year, which makes incidental encounters of my mother tongue somewhat distracting/disturbing/terrifying. It's as if everyone in the world is talking to me, and I've got little to nothing to say to them beyond "coffee".

I had meant to use this time to post all the pictures from my Korea trip. The connection is just fast enough to let me surf, but keeps timing out on the photos. I'll have to put them up later.

Hello from the Mile-High City. Whoo hoo. The airport, she is exciting.

pax

Airport Report: 38th Parallel

2006-08-01T22:48:00.000-04:00

All right, so it's been awhile. Internet access, once they shut the tap off at my house, was sporadic (in the sense that sporadic means nonexistent) and I've not had a chance to update.

In short:

I finished my work at the last school, had a few teary goodbyes, and gave yet another speech in front of the student body and assembled parents. There was much crying, and clapping, and bowing, and handshakes by all parties. The students (bow) presented me with a boquet of flowers (bow), two of my elective-subject English kids gave a cute little speech (first in English, then in Japanese) about never forgetting me, having had a lot of fun, and other things tailor-made to make a man break down and cry.

Had a sayonara enkai (Japanese for "big drinking party") with the Board of Education- I've got some pictures that I can upload from all of that later- and was given a pile of gifts that strain my carryon bag as we speak. Afterwards, "Mike"1 took me out for a drink at his favorite nomiya (drinkin' house), just like he did after my welcome enkai. Rounded out the experience quite nicely. The next few days were spent frantically cramming a house into boxes bound for the post office. Those of you who might be, in the future, planning on shipping things from Japan: Don't wait until the last minute. Sea mail departing Japan is quite reasonable, but takes a month. Airmail triples the cost. Express is like having someone take all your money and burn it in neat piles on the countertop.

Once all that was taken care of, I spent a beautiful last night in Kyoto setting fireworks off on the Kamogawa with the Foreign Legion. The next morning, 5:45 AM, "Mike" was kind enough to pick me up at my house and drive me over to the train station to wait for the first train. I watched my last sunrise in Japan filter gently through the smoke of Mike's cigarettes.

So then, Korea. Korea's a bit of work to blog without pictures; I'll give a preview. Korea is an extremely enthusiastic Japan. It's big, it's bright, it's colorful, and it's got something to prove. Where Japan will let a UNESCO World Heritage site sneak up on you unnanounced (right next to the Pachinko parlor, two doors down from the convenience store) everything here is lit up in neon and declares itself to be the absolute best in the world of whatever the heck it is. To be fair, they boast a few "biggest"s that do make the record books. They've got the biggest indoor amusement park in the world (Lotte World), the biggest flagpole and flag in the world ("Propaganda Village", North Korea), some really big gates and throne rooms. But really, it's Japan with kimchi, some more Western culture, and a decorator's eye towards extreme color. All the somber red-cedar temples and gates of Japan are, here, painted in greens, blues, whites, oranges- every color of the rainbow. The stately imperial brocades which are, in Japan, single-tone colors in muted shades, are Josephian coats of many colors. And the kimchi. Oh, god, the kimchi. It's delicious, but the smell permeates Korea like the odd, fleeting smell of fructose wafts through Japan. I can't wait to get home, and find out what my country smells like.

Best part of the South Korean trip (and it was all awesome- I went to this old, busted-up amusement park yesterday and tempted death on rollercoasters that looked as if they'd last been serviced before the Cold War- speaking of the Cold War:) was when we took a tour north, to Panmunjom and the Joint Security Area. The JSA sits on the North Korea-South Korea border in the DMZ (Demilitarized Zone). It's surreal. Armed guards in twin buildings sit all day staring at each other through the gaps between the UN conference rooms. A few of the conference buildings sit right on the line between NK and SK, and in there, I got to step over and spend a few minutes in Communist North Korea. I did not see Kim Jong-Il. I cannot confirm or deny that his ridiculous pompadour is real, rather than a trumped-up construction of Communist propaganda.

So I've got an hour or so before my flight back to the States. We're stopping first in San Francisco, then Denver, and finally, tonight at 11:50 PM, we're landing at home in Detroit. On paper, only ten hours pass between my departure at 1:50 and my arrival at 11:50. In reality, I've got 22 hours of transit time between now and then. Since I got to the airport (as required) two hours previous for security check, I'll have the exquisite pleasure of spending the next 24 hours in the fuzzy, comfortable haze of international travel. See you all when I hit stateside- I'll re-update this with pictures from my last week in Japan and my Korean Adventures.

Ja... matta, ne.

pax

Sayonara Season

2006-07-18T21:29:00.000-04:00

Today's the last day I'll be guaranteed internet access. Tomorrow, on the 20th, they throw the switch and plunge me back into the dark ages, where I'll wallow for a week before I return to the States. I'll make an effort to get to the internet cafe and check my mail every so often, but I'll be severely limited in my ability to write back. Last time I was in a netcafe, they had blocked Gmail entirely.

Last weekend was the Gion Matsuri, the biggest festival in the year in Kyoto. It was a big, three-day party that culminated in a parade Monday morning- which, despite torrential rain, was a heck of a thing to see. Ancient four-story tall floats ridden by flute-and-drum bands dragged by strangely cheery strongmen, maiko and geisha every three feet, music and rain and chaos... it was pretty cool. For fear of destroying my camera, I took no pictures, but a friend who was more intrepid than I managed to snag a few, and I'll put them up as soon as she sends them to me.

School is winding down. Tomorrow is closing ceremonies, where I am expected to make a speech. Today is just sad- everything is "Andrew-sensei's last whatever it is", from my last time teaching a 1st-grade class to "Well, last time you'll climb these stairs, isn't it?" The teachers and students seem to be bound and determined to make this as painful and saccharine as possible. Had a kid ask me yesterday how to say "zettai muri" in English- "Completely Impossible"- just so he could tell me, in my own language, that he wouldn't let me go home. "Andoryu-sensei home go completely impossible." I'm not sure how I'm going to "go impossible", but it was cute at the time.

This may or may not be my last post from Japan- I'm sure I'll get at least one from the airport, and one or two from the hotel in South Korea (not, in retrospect, the wisest vacation plan, given current geopolitics, but whatcha gonna do?), but if I don't...

It's been a heck of a ride. Thanks for coming along.

pax.

The Demon-Haunted Gate

2006-07-13T20:10:00.001-04:00

Marge: Come on, Homer. Japan will be fun! You liked Rashomon.
Homer: That's not how I remember it!
The Simpsons, "Thirty Minutes Over Tokyo"

It had to happen eventually. I've got a weakness for Japanese literature, film, and history- and as such anyplace that wraps the three up in one neat, tidy package is a can't-miss site. Even if it is just a post.

You could get the whole story of what the Rajomon is, and why it's important, from those three links above... but here's the short version.

The Rajomon was the old south gate of what used to be called "Heiankyo", the capital city of Japan that we call Kyoto now. It sat at the edge of the great wall that surrounded the city, and was flanked by two temples. One, I've been to before: Toji, the one with the big iconic pagoda. The other one, I'm not so sure exists anymore. The gate itself was a grand thing in the old days. Huge, golden-roofed, and awe-inspiring, it was the main entrance to the city for all travellers coming up from the temple city (and even older ex-capital), Nara. It was really only impressive in the "WOW THAT'S AWESOME" sense for a little while- it quickly became a place that you didn't want to be around at night. All the old folktales and warnings told to children populate the upper part of the gate with demons of all stripes, extending hooks down to snare the unwary. The short story says it was a body dump. This really doesn't make any sense unless you've seen a few big Japanese gates- they're really more like castle gates, with chambers above them. In temples, they usually house a small altar. In secular structures, they're places to post guards, fire arrows, dump oil and generally make things difficult for armies who want in.

This is really what the Rajomon OUGHT to look like,
up there in the distance past the "no vehicles" posts.

For reference, this is the main gate of　Nanzenji, a big temple complex on the northeast side of Kyoto, at the beginning of the path yet further north (哲学の道, or the Philosopher's Walk) that leads to Ginkakuji (銀閣寺), the Silver Temple.

But the gate went bad- the reputation for demons, dead bodies, and strange disappearances aside, the city went and grew beyond the gate, and it was allowed to fall to ruin. There's nothing there now- just this post. So I got a map, and asked around, and found it. It's not too hard to find- it's on a corner between the old main street and one of the new main streets. Those of you planning a trip to Japan, it's a little behind the intersection of　Senbon-doori and Kujo street.

It's a kid's park now. No demons, but there was this old lady walking her dog who thought I was a bit funny in the head to be hunting down a concrete post, but whatever. I hear there's a reconstruction of the North Gate, the Suzakumon, which might give me a better idea of what this thing looked like exactly... sans the see-saws.

pax

From the Picture Collection: Let's Enjoy Sign Extravaganza!

Hint: "Men" means "Noodles". Like "raMEN". No, that doesn't really help, does it?

We offer intelligence, excitement and infinite dream.
Or coffee and stale toast.

Text at bottom: I work hard to make sweets up to the present, because I want to see many smiles. I wish my sweets will be the start of your smile.

I cannot make this stuff up.

Time to fess up

2006-07-10T01:30:00.000-04:00

So, looks like it's come to be about that time. I've got three weeks left in Japan, every other day brings yet another person looking me gravely in the eyes and saying "Sayounara- if I don't see you ever again, have a good life", and I guess I have to admit both to myself and everyone out there in Blog Land that this story is pretty close to over.

I'll lose internet access on the 20th- so this is the beginning of my ten-day countdown.

Until then, here's what I've been up to recently:

I visited the Shrines at Ise two weeks ago, and I'm still waiting for my copy of the pictures. When I get them, I'll post them here, but until then:

Ise is The Main Shinto Shrine in Japan. It's composed of two shrines, really: the Outer Shrine, housing the goddess of food and industry, and the Inner Shrine, housing the Sun Goddess Herself. The site is so holy that to avoid impurity, they tear down and reconstruct from scratch all of the buildings every twenty years using only traditional no-nails interlocking beam-and-dowel construction, and the relics within are transferred to the brand-new buildings, at which point the old building is torn apart and the wood is given away to lesser shrines, so they can build their torii (shrine gates) out of the holy remains of the shrines.

You also can't actually SEE any of these shrines. They're surrounded by big, multilayered walls to keep the normal folks like you, me, and the general Japanese public far, far away from the holy items. The monks themselves haven't ever seen the holy relic that's enshrined in the Inner Shrine- the Holy Mirror of Amaterasu. They keep that one in a brocade bag, and when one bag starts to wear thin, they just wrap it up in another one. The guidebook snarkily mentions that these layers and layers of cloth wrapping "probably contain a sample of the best brocade work in Japan"- but we'll never, ever see it.

Even though I spent something like six hours on a train getting to and from a bunch of walled-up wooden buildings, the crowds of pilgrims, the cool minor shrines around the edges (hello, Wind God. How are you?) and the thought that the gods ACTUALLY PHYSICALLY LIVE in this place was well worth the whole deal. Very immediate faith, Shinto is... the Sun Goddess has a mailing address.

The next weekend (i.e. last weekend) I went the other direction entirely and saw a crazy-famous Buddhist temple in Uji- the Byodo-in. Byodo-in houses the "Phoenix Hall"- one of the most instantly recognizable temple buildings in Japan, as it's printed on the back of their 10-yen coin. Again, pictures are forthcoming, but in the meantime...

What struck me most about this temple was the fact that it, like almost all of the Buddhist temples in this country, was warm monochromatic brown wood. That's the color scheme, that's the way things go... but this one was old enough that it still showed faded paintings from back when Japanese Buddhism and Chinese Buddhism held the same design aesthetic. The whole place used to be filled with bright, crazy reds, greens, blues, and yellows, intricately painted statues of boddhisatvas, a golden Buddha sitting in the center of the hall... but now, it's just chips of paint embedded in the cedar, faded paintings on giant swinging panel doors, and a golden Buddha-Under-Reconstruction, with black lacquer showing through his layer of gold foil. The halo and pedestal of the big guy were still recieving their tender loving care, so they weren't up on display with the rest- and it gave the temple a very empty, austere, ghostlike feeling. There used to be colors, and music... now, there's just the one big bell, and faded paint exposed directly to the outdoors. The temple rests in the middle of a pond, built on a foundation of smooth stones- it looks like it could be floating- and the two phoenixes on the roof stare at each other quizzically, like they were wondering what the heck happened to the interior design team.

Don't get me wrong- it was beautiful- but it was beautiful in the same way a graveyard can be beautiful. Sad and sunbleached.

In desperate need of a pick-me-up, yesterday was an Osaka Extravanganza- science museum, National Gallery of Art, and some great Mexican food at one of the two Mexican restaurants in the entire Kansai region. As I understand it, there are two in Osaka, a few in Tokyo, and none anywhere else. When will the Japanese nation recognize the simple beauty of a burrito served from a drive-through window?

pax

To not climb it once is foolish

2006-06-26T04:35:00.000-04:00

... but to climb it more than once is also foolish.
-witty Japanese cliche about Mount Fuji

It's been awhile, blog. It's interesting- the more I've got to talk about, the less time I've got to say it- and with five weeks left in my Japanese adventure, I'm trying my best to have as little time spent in front of this keyboard as possible. Out of a sense of duty and a little bit of pride, though, here's a quick recap of the latest adventures:

1. Went with Veronica to go see the latest from the national Taiko drumming group, Kodo. Their piece, entitled Amaterasu, works with some big names in the Kabuki business, and retells the story of the sun goddess's fight with her brother, the wind god. This story is to Shintoism as Genesis is to Christianity, and as such it is told and retold over here in just about any form you could imagine. Let there be light.

It was... awesome. Sheer percussive bliss on giant taiko drums. Oh, and the sun goddess- the figure in white and gold on the Kodo splashpage? Yeah. She's a man. Scroll down to "Men's Kabuki"- these guys are called "Onnagata", and it's one of the most respected roles kabuki players can fill.Across from the Kabuki theater, we discover that some humor lives on independent of culture.

2. Walked the Philosopher's Walk, from Nanzen-ji to Ginkaku-ji in Kyoto. It's a two-kilometer stretch of little temples, shops, and shrines set along a canal. Evidently, some famous philosopher dude woke up every morning and hiked it as his constitutional. Either way, it was beautiful. I spent half a morning wandering around the halls of this smaller temple, the Eikando Zenrin-ji; a zen temple where (according to legend) in 1082, the head priest was chanting before a statue of the Amida Buddha when said statue stood up and walked past him, towards the door. He was so shocked (as should be expected) he stopped his prayers and stared gapemouthed at the walking figure o' Buddha. Amida turned back, looked over his left shoulder and gestured for the monk to keep at it before wandering out the door. Bereft of his Buddha statue, the head priest comissioned a new one- this one looking over its left shoulder. This is, evidently, the only statue like it in existence. Couldn't get a picture- that's 100% forbidden- but the temple was nigh unto abandoned, and as I was the only guy there who wasn't a monk, I spent a good chunk of the day just hanging out in the gardens.Gardens at Zenrin-Ji

3. Last weekend, I packed up some gear, called up my friend Jake, and hopped on the Shinkansen headed northeast. After a number of train transfers and about six hours of travel, we ended up at a little stop called Kawaguchi, the last station one can reach from this awesome-looking train.
Is it not beautiful? This thing goes to a theme park named Thomasland- well, to be fair, it first goes to Thomasland, and then continues on to Kawaguchiko, at the base of Mount Fuji.
That's Fuji in the middle there, poking out of the clouds ominously. We had decided that last weekend was the weekend to tackle the beast and finally climb the tallest mountain (3,776 meters!) in Japan. We climbed one weekend before the season began, and as such the place was nigh-unto deserted. On the way up, we passed: 3 Americans running for the bus at the bottom, one angry Texan who took the wrong road from the top, and one disappointed Australian who turned around one station from the top... she came unprepared- no coat, no gloves, no nothing.

Five people- all foreign tourists. Nearly four vertical kilometers. The mountain was all ours. It was empty, and beautiful, and cold. But let me start from the beginning.

We took a bus from Kawaguchiko to Camp 5, where the paved road gives out. Fuji's got nine numbered camps, nine being at the top and one at the bottom. Five is halfway, and about 2 kilometers up in the air. We only had to climb the last vertical 1.7 kilometers- not too much work, eh?

We spent 19 hours on the mountain. For Fuji, that's fast. We spent six of those hours in a hut at camp eight, waiting out the subzero hours between sunset and two a.m. The rest of the time? Climb away.

Camp 6 marks the treeline, at which point the landscape gives up on this:

and turns into this, complete with landslide-blocking walls reminiscent of jailblock

From the base of camp 7, however, it turns into something a whole lot more pleasant and fun- but quite a bit slower.

By the time we reached Camp 8, it was getting pretty dark, and pretty cold. We stopped to catch our breaths in front of what we thought was just another abandoned mountain hut, when we noticed people moving around inside. None of the huts were supposed to be open, but there was this British guy on a trip around the world who had booked a bunk in there- so, mindful of the cold and the dark, we took shelter in the hut for awhile.

Pictures Around Camp:
At 2:30 in the morning, Jake and I strapped on headlamps and made for the summit. The British guy came too, but he turned out to be as woefully equipped as the Australian we met earlier. This guy headed for the top in two t-shirts, a rainjacket, socks for gloves and a pair of raver glowsticks for illumination. He made it about twenty minutes uphill (the air starts to thin really quickly up there in the last half-kilometer to the top) and started to take laborious, gasping breaths. He got a present: the oxygen I had brought along in case I couldn't acclimatize. Fuji isn't so very tall that oxygen support is necessary- I didn't end up using it at all- but if for some reason if your body doesn't want to get along on less than it's used to, it's good to have a bottle. Especially if your newfound buddy's idea of "climbing gear" is tube socks on his hands.

We made the top just before first light, and kicked back in the leeward side of a boulder to watch the best sunrise in the land of the rising sun.

After the sunrise, we kicked around the crater a bit, visited the meteorological station on the far side, and touched the Highest Point in Japan- 3,776 meters in the sky.

This is particularly cool- this is the shadow of Mount Fuji, thrown down the west side of the mountain. Note the symmetry- it's Fuji's big selling point.

This is also really cool- there's a Torii (shrine gate) on a rise just above the shrine at the top of Fuji (which, when we were up there, was bolted shut for the offseason)- and this shrine gate has a bunch of coins POUNDED INTO THE WOOD.
The hook in the center is used to hang offerings to be burnt during the big Fire Festival they have up there every year.

After spending a few hours playing on the summit (there was this cool expanse next to the crater where everyone who came up spelled their names out in white rocks- how could we not?) we headed back down, back through the layers of clouds we had walked up through the day before. On the way, we saw a hut owner drying out his futons on his roof- pretty cool.

Down through the clouds...

climbing chains on Fuji.

We hit the bottom a few hours before the first bus back to the station- plenty of time for a celebratory ice-cream cone at the 5th station. 5th station is a bit of a tourist trap- it's low enough that they can pipe power to it, rather than having to run generators (like our hut up on 8) so there are souvenir shops, a burger stand, some ramen stores, a rest house, and pony rides that'll take you as far as Camp 7. Oi. We opted out of all that, and clambered back on the bus- for the six-hour train ride home.

Next day, was I smart? Did I sleep? No.

I went with Veronica to Osaka, saw a Chagall exhibition at the Suntory museum, wandered around the Osaka Aquarium, and rode The World's Largest Ferris Wheel (that may or may not be the actual largest- they used some pretty fuzzy language, but who am I to argue with their pitch?)- and THEN collapsed for a few hours. Today?

Work.
But these two signs, they bolster my courage.

As a parting sentiment, I leave you with a message straight from the streets.
pax

Ninja!

2006-06-12T20:13:00.000-04:00

All right, time to take a break from the weighty philosophical issues and pedagogical kung-fu of teaching in Japan, and go have a little fun.

This past weekend, I went to the Koka Ninja Village! Koka's a little town about half an hour away from Ritto down the JR Kusatsu line, and it has the dubious honor of hosting a famous little place where they used to train deadly assassins to be hired out by lords living in the not-too-distant but far-enough-not-to-kill-us capital of Kyoto. It's up in the mountains, worlds away from everything else, and in today's age where convenience reigns supreme, it looks quite frankly as if it's had the crap kicked out of it by a rival clan of ninja. The plural form of Ninja is, of course, Ninja- they're like deer, or sheep, or whatever. My secret theory is that the plural and singular are identical so that you never know how many ninja are under discussion- and the cry of "Look out! Ninja!" should always be interpreted to mean "Look out! 50 or so armed killers!" rather than "Hey, a guy in black pyjamas."

Though the place is a wreck physically, historically it's still impressive- on these grounds, the Koka-Ryu school of ninjitsu was founded and perfected, and these guys were feared for their fighting prowess and all-out sneaky choppy buttkicking. There are an array of entertainments- for the kids, of course- that one can partake in if one is so inclined, but the financial state of the village makes it so that most of the attractions are enjoyed sans attendants- which, in some ways, increases the fun by adding an element of ninja danger. All of the attractions are, thankfully, pretty do-it-yourself, with the exception of the Ninja House, of which I have no photographs- the ninja guide was less than permissive, and I felt that disobeying the orders of a man in black pyjamas wearing two-toed boots would be, frankly, unwise. The House was pretty cool- what seemed to be a one-story thatched-roof hut was in fact a three-story thatched-roof hut riddled with secret doors, panels that rotate and swing around, entrances hidden behind hanging scrolls (cleverly, the shodo calligraphy that hung in front of the secret door said, as if we needed a reminder, Ninja), false floors and secret ninja crawlspaces. Unlike the defenses of a castle, all of these systems seemed to be centred upon getting people OUT of the house- escape being the Ninja way, and all. You saw Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. "Ninja- VANISH!"

Speaking of which, they had these cool tunnels running through the village that an enterprising ninja could use to move undetected- like this one.

They had a shuriken throwing range- fun and dangerous, perfect for the kids- a ninja museum, showing real ninja armor, secret ninja ropeladders, shuriken, kusari-gama (ninja fighting chains), ninja hand gestures (a combination sign language and "ninja chi magic"- pretty cool) and an outdoor stage, next to the long list of "Ninja Adventure"-style attractions. I think that the Ninja were likely the first ropes-course construction experts in Japan- there was a fallen log to shimmy across a mudpit, some walls to scale, a roofline to navigate, a ninja zipline (again, over a mudpit- the ninja believe in consequences) and, best of all, a Ninja River Crossing Simulator.

Check it out. You stand on these Ninja Donuts, and pull yourself hand-over hand across the Ninja Pond. The donuts are made of the highest Ninja Quality Styrofoam and Plywood, both invented in the year 670 AD by the Ninja masters.

We now return you to your regularly-scheduled ninja-free programming.
(they're not my pictures, but for more shots of the grounds and features of this ninja village, visit this site.)

A Thoroughly Uneventful Apocalypse

2006-06-06T20:57:00.000-04:00

Well, if you're reading this, we all made it. I'm posting this at work, which means it's around 11:30 at night where most of you live- the likelihood of an apocalypse and/or rapture in the next thirty minutes is pretty slim, so I'm prepared to say: I have seen the future (having lived through the coming apocalypse yesterday), and the worst that 6/6/6 had to throw at me was a bum battery in my alarm clock, nearly making me late for work on 6/7/6 (or 7/6/6, depends on where you are). All of this is immaterial in Japan, where it's Year 18, and the number of the beast nonsense matters to nobody but fearful ex-pats and thrashmetal bands (I'm lookin' at you, "SIGH" and "MORBID AXE"), and the Day of Reckoning passed with hardly a blip.

Mandatory Kids Are Hilarious Story/Johnny Cash Reference:

So I'm teamed up with a student teacher to teach a unit on nicknames. We explain a short dialogue of the "Hi, My Name Is James, Call Me Jim" variety, pass out some fake nicknames that the kids will appropriate, and get ready to start a dialogue game in which they collect as many names as possible in a short amount of time using the English dialogue we've prepared. Pretty standard stuff. The moment we pass the names out, a kid throws out the biggest "MY GOD, THIS SUCKS" (In Japanese, "men do kusai!!") and, when questioned, expresses that he is unhappy with his nickname, as it's a girl's name and he's a manly little eighth grader.

The name? Romeo. Oddly, the boy across the room with "Juliet" seemed entirely unperturbed- so we whipped out a list of nicknames, and ran down the list asking the students whether each was a boy's name or a girl's name. Turns out that Deborah is a man, Romeo is a woman, and there's really nothing wrong with a boy named Sue.

Mandatory Japanese Is Hilarious Post:

Check out this promo poster for an upcoming epic film on the rise of a gangsta superstar:

The title, in katakana, reads "getto ricchi oa dai torain"- which, after sufficient verbal gymnastics, resolves into Get Rich or Die Trying. That's funny enough, but the real kicker here is in the fine white print, which advertises "Hip-Hop World's Charisma: 50 Sento!"

also: Osaka

is crowded. To charm you, it has:

great manhole covers,

cathedrals wedged into hotels,

and spiral escalators.

Giant in Wonderland

2006-05-24T03:39:00.000-04:00

Had to come home early today to deal with my infestation problem- there are winged ants in the wood in the walls, and as a Japanese house is not constructed to keep anything in or out (nothing here really "seals", so it's the same temperature inside and out all year round, and bugs have essentially free passage) the best I can do for it is spray 'em when they appear, and wait for the exterminator to come- a Godot-like experience, as the exterminator was due yesterday, might have arrived today, and is due "sometime by Friday". Seems he's busy this season- perhaps now might be a good time to begin building the houses around here out of brick.

Anyways- that's not the real story. Since I was coming home around 2:40, the train platform was nearly empty. I managed to make an excellent train connection (only a minute wait!) and was silently glowing with glee at my amazing luck when...

I stepped into a train car full of elementary school students. Literally, the whole train car was packed roof to floor with kids- no adults in sight- who saw me and immediately SWARMED. My hands were shaken, my backpack tugged on, and it was only a combination of dimly-remembered skill and catlike reflexes that saved me from an armada of incoming Kancho attackers.

I spent two stops playing with the kids- essentially being subjected to a battery of personal questions, a lightning-fast test of my Japanese, and constantly hovering one step away from an abyss of Kancho pain. They were from the next town over, going on an after-school trip to some temple in Kyoto, and as such had never met me- it was like the first day I got here, all over again. Every new group reacts essentially the same way, but you see it from a swarm of grinning kids and you can't help but laugh. When I got off the train, the entire car gave me a "BYE-BYE" that resonated throughout the station like the ring of a temple bell, and I believe continues to susurrate in the hallway at this very moment. It was a good way to end a workday- now, I must continue my battle with the ants. As an apology for a curtailed entry, have some more Kyushu pictures!

One Ugly, Angry Dude; Shimabara Castle, Shimabara Peninsula, Kyushu. This peninsula was the last stand of Japan's early Christians- though it creates an interesting mental picture, many lords and samurai converted to Christianity, and when the edict came down that no "foreign" religion was to be tolerated, they holed up on the peninsula here and fought to the death. Many were killed in the fighting, and those captured were boiled to death in natural volcanic vents called "Jigoku"- Hells- that now provide water for hot-spring resorts.

A Hell.

The front-door arch of the Murakami Cathedral at Nagasaki, relocated to the epicenter site. The cathedral was largely ruined- the statues melted and bleached, the great hall fell- but this arch stood after the blast, and has been preserved in the state it was found.

Enough creepy stuff! Here's the Chihiro Waterfall on Yakushima- inspiration for Miyazaki's "Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi", released in America as "Spirited Away". It was INCREDIBLY BEAUTIFUL- there's a hiking path to the bottom, but we were short on time. I WILL go back to that island.

100th Post; a word on Japanese Mountain Climbing

2006-05-23T02:41:00.000-04:00

So a few weeks ago, I took a solo trip up Mt. Hiei, the holy mountain northwest of Kyoto. It's 848 vertical meters of rocky riverbed trail... the climb up takes a meager two hours, or you can ride a ropeway most of the way up- excellent for the physically or spiritually handicapped, but anyone else caught riding that thing should be shot. (Subnote: I wholly endorse handicap-accessible mountains, provided that those who lack an actual handicap are given one if they wish to use the amenities.) I saw one person on the entire climb up- about fifteen minutes in, an old man decked out in full pilgrim gear traipsed down the mountain and bellowed a hearty Konnichiwa that belied the fact that he looked like he could easily have been pushing ninety. Mt. Hiei is famous for the temple complex sprawled out across most of its upper reaches- Enryaku-ji, the home of the famous Tendai warrior-monks and keepers of an eternal oil flame, tended by the priests, that they've managed to keep burning for 1200 years. That's right, kids- since 806 AD, some poor monk has had to schlep oil into a little lantern every day, and make sure he doesn't sneeze while he's at it.

That, however, is not the story. The story is thus: I climbed the mountain, and in my quest to actually say I CLIMBED the thing I forsook the ropeway, skipped the stairs and scrambled up a dry riverbed to the temple complex, some hundred meters below the top. The temple itself is pretty cool- one of the nicer ones I've seen, and I FINALLY got to clamber up into the insides of a big ol' temple gate (usually closed, as it's believed they're demon-haunted; for the most famous gate of this kind, read Rashomon- the actual Rasho Gate no longer exists, but they've got a little marker in south Kyoto to tell you where it was)- but the road to the summit was nigh-impossible to find. Feeling like a thief, I traipsed through a graveyard and up an old trail that wound me past ancient gravestones and up to the final approach- where I found an ABC Broadcasting Tower sitting on the broad expanse just below the true peak. After a bit of searching, I found the false peak- 830 meters.

It was covered in concrete. There's a road that leads all the way up, and buses that run every half hour. There's a garden museum, some udon shops, and a gift stall. My heart broke, but the land was higher a little further away, so I kept climbing.

In a grove of cedars, a tiny marker indicated that I was standing on the tallest point of the mountain- 848 meters- and all around the little marker were wooden votive tablets with names of climbing clubs on them. The Kyoto Climbing Society, Otsu, Osaka- almost all the towns large enough to have a climbing club had made the effort and found the tiny-stupid-out-of-the-way trail to claw up the last muddy eighteen meters and stand in a viewless grove of cedars for a few moments.

I had a seat and wolfed a chocolate bar, listened to the engines of the buses groaning in the valley below, and silently thanked the mountain gods that no entrepreneur had decided to build an escalator to the peak.

pax yorochikubo

Beyond Kyushu

2006-05-22T03:01:00.000-04:00

Forget it! I've been captive to these megaposts for far too long. The attempt to create another giant novel about a vacation is 1) impossible, given that in order to do that I'd need "free time", 2) not the point, as this is a blog about Teaching In Japan, and 3) just too stinking long.

We're gonna try an experiment: One post a day, next five days, get me back into the swing of things. One story, short, sweet, anecdotal. At the end of each post, one Kyushu picture.

I left my first school last week. Since I only visit each school for a month at a time, having three schools means that with the two months I've got left, I will never return to Ritto JHS. I will miss the kids; my rockstars were from that school, and though the world's tiniest rockband has graduated and gone on to high school, the atmosphere at Ritto was awesome. I'll miss it. By way of example:

Over the last month, I was adopted by a set of third-grade students led by a big guy named Kubo and his eloquent grand vizier, Matsui. Every day at lunch, they came into the teacher's room, brashly pushed past the magic line (there is a magic line on the floor of every teacher's room past which the students may not intrude- at some schools, it is enforced, at some, it is ignored. Usually, at Ritto, it was enforced with an iron fist) and charged up to my desk, to engage in a ritual halfway between a private English lesson and a Catholic confessional. Kubo and his crew would regale me with what they had done that day- what teachers they walked out on, what grand feats of athleticism they were intending to accomplish, how much noise they made, the proper pronunciation of Kubo's name (strong on the BO, and guttural- let the second half rattle in your throat like you're shaking a handful of gravel in a bucket)- and then attempt to teach me the Japanese for inappropriate parts of the body. Their big goal (stop me if you've heard this one) was to teach me how to imitate (and improve upon) a Japanese comedian who cleverly wordplays off of "nice to meet you" while twirling his hands around the sides of his chest.

They never managed to get me to do it, but they tried and tried, repeating the phrase and gesture and telling me why it was "Very important", and that I "had to"- and so a deal was struck. They pay attention in class, and learn to explain to me in English what the fuss was about, and I'd give it a go. Kubo and Matsui got better every day at giving me reasons to bow slightly and give a hearty "Yorochikubi" (the modified "nice-to-meet-you", half "yoroshiku" nice to meet you and half "chikubi"- nipple). They even modified it, slipped Kubo's name in at the end, so it was nothing but a garbled, mangled inside joke; YorochikuBO. Of course, as I am a professional teacher, I refused to humor them- wouldn't be proper. And so my final day came and went, and I did my farewell speech to the student body amidst crying kids and farewell notes and promises of mail to come (everyone's got my address in the States now- Mom, Dad, if you get some letters...) and as I was walking out towards the door Kubo and Matsui caught me in a hug, telling me how sad they were I was leaving... I couldn't resist. It had to happen.

My pronunciation was FLAWLESS. Slight bow, hands a-twirlin', the words from my lips ending forever my career in politics...

"YorochikuBO!"

I love my job. They were the happiest kids in the world, and though I watch the inbox on my desk for a termination notice, one has not yet arrived.

A forest in Yakushima, home to living cedar trees (cryptomeria) older than the Bible. Forking away from this gorge was a dry, rocky riverbed that used to feed into it that led into the "Mononoke Forest" that inspired Miyazaki to make "Princess Mononoke" (sidenote: I'll show you the picture of the Chihiro Waterfall that inspired "Spirited Away" later- seems Miyazaki LOVES Yakushima.)Coastline, Yakushima. Yakushima is about two hours south of Kyushu by jetfoil, an unspoiled natural fairyland and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Google Earth it. 30°20'48.42"N, 130°30'57.72"E.

pax yorochikubo!

Too many megaposts!

2006-05-08T03:42:00.000-04:00

I'm back in Ritto- spent nine days backpacking around Kyushu, the Southern Island of Japan (well, as long as you don't count Okinawa) and the cradle of Japanese civilization. Religion plays pretty big down there- the gods lived on that island, and moved north with the early Japanese as they swept up to what is now Honshu, the Main Island of Japan, and Kyushu was also the holdout point for the early doomed Christians of Japan- they hid out on the Shimabara Peninsula, and put up quite a fight before being virtually exterminated and driven underground. Some of the coolest stuff I saw while I was down there were crypto-Christian artifacts that disguised Mary as the goddess Kannon, or Jesus as an incarnation of the Buddha, or worked subtle crosses into sword crossguards and the bottoms of icons of other religions- but more on that later. I'm trying to keep the epic length of these things down (so I can tell you more and slideshow less), so this post is really for one thing and one thing only:

Tale from the Issahaya Train Station, Kyushu, Japan
dialogue translated from the Japanese by A. Moll

A man in what appeared to be his late sixties, sitting on the wooden bench on the platform headed to Shimabara Port, adjusted his baseball cap and called out to me in laughing English. "You! Where from?" In my politest Japanese, I told him that I was from America, but that I live in Shiga Prefecture. With a broad smile, he asked me what I was doing down in Kyushu, waiting on a platform for a train that only comes once every three hours. Tourists, evidently, stick to cities with reliable transportation. I told him my story- I had just left Nagasaki, and was taking a shortcut across the bay between Shimabara and Kumamoto before heading on to Mt. Aso (google earth 32º53'03.80" N, 131º05'06.43" E- the greenish blue pit is a lake of volcanic sulphur), an active volcano in central Kyushu. He laughed again, told me that was great, but had I heard of this other mountain, named Kaimon? Of course, I had not. So he told me about it.

Kaimon is called the Fuji of Kyushu. It's symmetrical like Fuji, fairly large- like Fuji- and holy. Just like Fuji. It's also the site of a peculiar ritual that this man felt the need to act out, in the train station, complete with gestures. He told me that during the war with my country, kamikaze pilots departing from Okinawa would circle Kaimon three times, waggle their wings as a final Sayonara, and depart for their targets. His explanation was joyful and enthusiastic- he stood, he walked in circles with his arms outstretched like airplane wings, he waggled them back and forth to indicate the Goodbye, and he ended it with his straightened hand slamming plane-wise into his other hand, which then crumpled. He told me that all the kamikaze pilots would do this- every single one- as part of their pre-mission ritual. And then he grinned that big grin at me, and touched the brim of his baseball cap, and winked.

"But me, I didn't go. Have a good trip."

A few stops down the line, he walked past my seat on his way out, saluted me, and said "Sayonara."

pax

The Great Escape Part 3: Vietnam

2006-04-11T07:46:00.000-04:00

Same Same… but Different.

(t-shirt and popular English expression in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand)

I spent the lion’s share of my vacation (9 days!) in Vietnam. It was great- a real adventure. Armed only with a Lonely Planet, a vague idea of where we were going, and a bootleg photocopy of a Vietnamese phrasebook (purchased at a little shop a few doors down from our hotel), we set out to explore the land that about thirty-five years ago was the last place on earth most American men aged 18-25 would willingly go. Vietnam is still rebounding from what they call the American War, and everywhere you go you can see its effects. Bombed-out houses, rubble in the streets, homeless, legless, armless people staring out from every corner- and yet the populace is so happy that we’re there that it’s at times overwhelming.

Let me tell you a story- this story is not mine. A man I met in a bar in Hoi An (we’ll get to how I ended up in Hoi An later) was traveling up north, in the highlands. Let’s call him Bob- I can’t remember his name. A guy on the street called out to Bob, asked him where he was from. Bob’s from Colorado, USA. He tells the guy on the street, and the guy smiles real big and shakes his hand. The man slaps his leg, and exclaims to Bob “American!” Bob is understandably confused. The man pulled his trouser leg up a bit, and said again “American!” The man was wearing a prosthetic leg. He explained haltingly that his village was bombed during the war by American B-52’s. This is not a source of anger or frustration for him- quite the opposite- the man is happy because he and Bob have something in common- they have a bond. Bob took a picture with the guy, and it is clear in the picture (digital cameras are great, you can pass them around in bars in Hoi An) that the gentleman in question has no foot, and is standing on a large round peg instead.

This is Vietnam.

The first day we arrived in Ho Chi Minh City, we arrived to a press of people all shouting, asking us if we wanted a taxi, a motorbike, a cyclo (curious carriage instruments that in other countries are called pedicabs or tuktuks), a pack of cigarettes, some books- all standing in a semicircle beyond the arrival gates. We negotiated with a woman behind the tourist counter for a fixed-rate taxi (five dollars), and pushed through the crowd and into the cab. A note on Vietnamese currency: The official Vietnamese unit of currency is called the Dong. One US dollar will get you thirteen thousand dong. This means that when we changed out money at the airport, we ended up immediate multimillionaires. We will, for the simple fact that this blog is a family show, resist the urge to make sophomoric comments about dong. Resist.

Ho Chi Minh City is divided into numbered districts. District 1 bears the original name of the city- the prewar name: Saigon. After Reunification Day, the name of the city was changed to reinforce the sentiment that the populace had changed after the soldiers had left. Anyone who fought for the South Vietnamese Army was, at this time, in a great deal of trouble with the Law. Even now, these men and the families of these men cannot get normal jobs. They are the men who drive the cyclos, speaking the perfect English that they learned working alongside American servicemen during the war. They are the motorbike taxi drivers, vagrants, and beggars. The State blocks them from employment, and as a result there is no shortage of impromptu tour guides who are more than happy to show you around the city, the country, wherever.

The traffic here is also something else. Lights are suggestions, and your place on the priorities list is directly proportional to the size of your vehicle. Pedestrians, being so small in the road hierarchy as to be naught but a nuisance, walk with impudence through the traffic as motorbikes swerve ahead and behind. Even they, however, fear the bus and the truck, as they are giant-kings.

The taxi, interestingly is really the only actual car I see on the road. Every so often someone will have a personal automobile, but it’s pretty rare. Everyone has a motorbike. As such, our taxi driver cut through the mass of bikes at a pretty good pace, pausing only for those piloting a beast larger than his own, and got us to our hotel in about twenty minutes. The Peace Hotel, located firmly in the backpacker ghetto of Saigon, was home for the next few days.

After checking in and getting our stuff up to the room, we went forth in search of food. This being night 1, we weren’t so adventurous as to hit up the roadside food stall right away- I saved that for later- so Richelle and I found a restaurant less than a block away and ordered up some Pho- the quintessential Vietnamese noodle dish. A hearty, eat-like-kings multi-course dinner for two: About three dollars. Vietnam is awesome.

After dinner, Richelle was feeling tired, and went back to the room. I went forth in search of adventure, wandering the back alleys of our little backpacker district. Turns out we were only a few blocks from the Ben Thanh Market, a giant indoor marketplace that we’d visit the next day. For now, however, I found all this:

Ho Chi Minh By Night!

A concert in the park! Note the awesome propaganda backdrop.

This is that rotunda I showed you earlier- the one with me wading through traffic. It is just as busy at ten at night as it is at ten in the morning.

This is a closeup of the statue- I’m not entirely sure what it’s a statue OF, but it’s a statue.

After a good amount of nighttime wandering, and a bit of work endearing myself to the local street-child population (who wander around much like I did, except they do it with cases of cigarettes to sell, packs of gum, books, counterfeit sunglasses and cheap costume jewelry) I returned to the hotel and collapsed.

The next day, I woke up really early and decided to go out for another walk. The locals exercise really early in the morning and really late at night to avoid the heat, which already was so hot as to encourage midday siestas in air conditioned rooms. So when I went down to the park, I found:

People getting ready for some early-morning martial arts practice- the local art seems to revolve around hitting things with sticks.

Badminton is incredibly, inscrutably popular in Vietnam. Everyone plays it. Those that don’t play it play a variant that involves kicking a modified shuttlecock around a circle like a hackysack. Everyone in this picture is swinging at once in their two-person badminton pairs. There are no nets- they just hit the shuttlecock back and forth.

On the way back to the hotel, I was accosted by a pack of three beggar kids. I didn’t buy the act- it was fairly weak, and just asking for money doesn’t get you too far- but I saw a unique opportunity. I herded them up, walked them down to the closest Pho stand, and bought them each a breakfast. In return, I grilled them about their names, ages, whether they go to school (yep, they do) and why they were out begging (parents make them). I insisted they earn their meals by teaching me some Vietnamese- it’s a tonal language, so the pronunciation doesn’t make sense without a model or a teacher, despite the tonal notation that they append to the roman alphabet. I felt pretty good about the transaction: Feed a hungry child, learn some new stuff, and there’s no chance of them taking the pho back to parents who use it to buy booze.

Having taken care of my nagging Samaritan urges, I returned to the hotel to pick up Richelle, and we decided to go out and try to follow the walking tour of Saigon listed in the Lonely Planet. So we started at the Ben Thanh Market.

The market sells everything you would ever want to buy, at flexible prices inflated grossly for bargaining purposes. Everyone wants you to purchase from them- the aggressive sell is the only sales tactic that anyone in this country seems to know, from the moto drivers to the little cigarette saleskids to the merchants in the market- and everyone is willing to drop the price as far as 50% off the pittance they’re charging in the first place.

It’s crowded, and dark, and loud, and crazy, and I loved it. They were selling food (ready-to-eat and/or in giant bags; spices, coffee, meat, everything 1000 dong/1kilo or some ridiculous price) , clothes, gifts, jewelry, cloth, gold, children’s toys, whatever your little heart desires, it’s somewhere in the market. I found a place selling kitchen appliances, right next to a booth hawking shoes that looked like they had fallen off the back of a truck bound for a designer boutique.

After the market, we worked our way up through another market; a little street market that sold mostly drugstore-type stuff, but was interesting to meander through. We then tacked north, towards the old theatre and the People’s Communist Party Headquarters.Communist HQ is to the left of this picture, down about a block. This is the old Theatre Building, important for something but I’m not quite sure what. More interesting? The propaganda posters we found on the way!

Richelle finds that X marks the POWER OF COMMUNIST ATOMIC FUSION!

Uncle Ho (Ho Chi Minh himself, ladies and gentlemen) says Hello!

Richelle and I stand admiringly under the gaze of good old Uncle Ho!

Because Communist Republics with Anti-Free Speech Laws invite mockery.

As we rounded the corner to head towards the Reunification Palace and the War History Museum, we were taken by surprise! Seems someone had heard about our lampooning Uncle Ho!

OH GOD A TANK!

So the Communists weren’t really after us, it was just a tank sitting (why? Who knows?) in a courtyard. Turns out this courtyard was fully stocked against incursion- it was the War History Museum, in a place entirely opposite of where our guidebook indicated it would be.

So there’s a tank.

There are also fighter jets.

And, in case everything goes wrong and the Americans attack again, there’s…

A wedding. At the War History Museum. This speaks for itself.

So, moving on, we saw a big cool university-type place. I like buildings that aren’t afraid to clash orange and blue. It bespeaks confidence.

We saw the palace and Notre Dame, but they were both closed for lunch.

So we hitched a ride with a couple of motorbike drivers and had them take us out to the Jade Emperor Pagoda, the last stop on the walking tour.

Temples in Vietnam are MUCH MORE COLORFUL than temples in Japan. They don’t invoke the same quiet reverence, but they definitely make me want to sing.

Storeroom in the temple- thought it was a cool picture.

Chillin’ on the roof.

Holy turtles in a dirty fountain.

So we left the Jade Emperor Pagoda, got some lunch, and returned to the Reunification Palace. The Palace used to be called Independence Palace- everyone’s seen the tank busting through the gates and heard the famous quote from the South Vietnamese president to the North Vietnamese soldier who crashed his door: “I have been waiting here since morning to give power over to you.” “There is no question of you giving power. You cannot give what you do not have.”

So here are the pictures THEY DON’T WANT YOU TO SEE:

Behold:

The Presidential Casino! Poker table up front, blackjack in back, mahjongg to our left… and to the right, definitive proof that the South Vietnamese President was cooler than any other presidents I can think of (‘cept maybe Clinton):

Ladies and gentlemen, Jim Morrison. How can you forcibly extract a man from office who proudly displays Jim Morrison in his gambling den?

And what’s more, he’s got a Presidential Dance Floor.

Note Richelle breaking out "The Lawn Sprinkler"; a North American favorite.

In case he has to flee his hordes of screaming fans entranced by the emotive power of his dancing, or if the cops show up to bust his party, his helicopter is but a stone’s throw away.

After the top floor dance-floor, we were led into the basement, which made for some disturbing pictures:

The Radio Room (why put it in the basement? Reception’s gotta be lousy),

The Bomb Shelter (duck ‘n cover like you learned in grade school)

And the Kitchen (I have nothing funny to say about this.)

The Reunification Palace finished, we went for a hike to visit the Post Office. Uncle Ho, as always, presides over this beautiful old building.

After that, back to Notre Dame.

I think this says everything that needs to be said about Notre Dame in Ho Chi Minh City.

Well, that, and this:

Note: All those little plaques are purchased by church supporters, asking Mary for mercy or grace in French, the langue d’eglise around here. In the religions that have taken hold more strongly in Vietnam than Catholicism (notably Confucianism and Buddhism) buying indulgences is perfectly fine- you want a car, buy a biiiig stick of incense from the temple and burn it, and your prayers will be heard. These plaques seem like the same kind of indirect simony- somehow, it just doesn’t seem to be just donations.

With Notre Dame off the list, our walking tour was complete. So we skipped back towards the hotel, got some dinner, and again I was alone to wander. I ended up going to “Apocalypse Now” a longtime fixture of the Saigon nightlife scene. I wanted to know what it was like. I give you this review: Dark, expensive, but the music was funny. Anytime I can hear the 4 Non Blondes followed by that popular-for-no-reason “Dragonestea din Tei” (better known as the Myla HIIII, myla HAAA song), we’re at the right level of campy, stupid music for a decent night. All the same, I skipped out early, and learned a very important lesson.

After dark, everyone in Saigon becomes a pimp. Every motorbike driver offered not a ride home, but a “massage” and then, even more disgustingly, “boom-boom.” People came out of locked, dark storefronts to offer me this “boom-boom”. I ended up just walking home to the hotel. OLD LADIES offered up boom-boom! OLD MEN! Young guys on motorbikes WITH GIRLS ON THE BIKE BEHIND THEM! Hounded, I escaped to the hotel and resolved to leave Saigon for awhile- get out to the country, find out what Vietnam’s really like- beyond the traffic, the noise, the boom-boom peddlers.

So the next morning we got on a plane and flew north to Danang, with the intention of renting a motorbike and riding south to Hoi An. We couldn’t find a bike- Danang is a big city, but the airport’s a few kilometers from the city center, and we had to make do and take a taxi down.

Hoi An is a tailor’s village- a small town on the bank of a big river filled to bursting with shops selling custom-made clothing and shoes. They turn out work here that would cost thousands of dollars elsewhere and sell it for pennies. They can copy or fake up anything you bring them- and they’ll do it in a day. I myself bought new shirts, pants, shoes and a coat here- and am kicking myself for not dropping the twenty dollars on a suit. Yep, 20 bucks, tailored, custom-made suit. I am a fool.

But besides from being a shopper’s paradise, Hoi An also sports an impressive collection of French colonial-era architecture.

Once here, we rented a motorbike to get around (no sense in getting taxis everywhere, with the distances we wanted to cover) and set about exploring the countryside.

There were a few bikes, over the next few days. We couldn’t keep any given one for more than 1 day, and they rented out at $5 USD a day. So we just swapped them out for new ones- just as well, as some were kind of suspect in the quality department.

Gas around here comes either from petrol stations (in the cities) or at these roadside hand-pump petrol stands. Even the price of gas is something you can (and should) bargain for- they routinely mark up the price for foreigners.

The first day, on the green bike in picture 1, we went to My Son. My Son is an archaeological site, a temple complex of the ancient Cham civilization. It looks, honestly, like a movie set.

Stuff like this doesn’t exist in real life.

So we wandered the ruins for awhile, found some cool spots to take pictures, learned all about the ancient Chams and their craaaaazy brickworking skills (evidently, there is no mortar in any of these photographs- the bricks were somehow fused together). Interesting finds:

Decapitated statuary,

Recapitated statuary,

Cool bridges,

Daring escapes from Vietnamese prisons…

Long walks,

and little kids. In fact, on the walk into the ruins we were befriended by a middle school class of thirty, who talked with us all three kilometers in. Their English was excellent- they evidently practice with all the tourists.

After bumbling around the ruins for an hour or two, we hopped back on the bike, rode the 40 kilometers back into town, and just kept right on going North into the Marble Mountains.

Everybody likes a bit of a free climb.

These mountains are, as the name suggests, made entirely of natural marble. They aren’t particularly tall (by mountain standards), but the fact that they're sheer lumps of marble that look as if they've been dropped from the pockets of distracted giants more than makes up for their lack of ohmygodthat'sbig-itude.

Inside the mountains, there are huge natural caves in which the locals have built temples.

In fact, the whole mountain is a temple complex- there are temples inside, temples outside, temples on top… everywhere.

The place felt holy- it was quiet, there were hardly any other tourists around, and the immensity of the caves gave the same feeling as being in the great hall of a church. As we wound our way up and around the mountain, we came across places where so many hands and feet had rubbed before that the marble was polished smooth- there was a narrow chimney of rock rising out of a cave full of natural handholds- some rockslide a long time ago had left something approximating a ladder of jutting rocks- and each new little handhold or foothold was waxy-smooth marble.

When we climbed back down, exhausted and sunburned, we hopped back on the bike and rode back to Hoi An. Even out here in the country, we managed to barely avoid hitting or being hit by:

Trucks
Buses
Taxis
Chickens
Cows
Weird Rube-Goldberg Motorcycle/Wagons
Schoolkids
Schoolkids ON BIKES

We dropped off the bike, and spent the evening clothes shopping.

Well, clothes shopping, looking at boats on the river, and having some food down in the restaurant district. Can’t shop all the time.

We spent another day in Hoi An, and I just wandered the city while Richelle went shopping. Walked out past where the city ends and into the village surrounding, and found, in the space of any one block, a thatched hut and a modern mansion sitting side-by-side.

Wandered across a rice paddy with an old woman out working- had to take a picture.

Not quite sure what’s going on here, but it looked cool.

The next day was our last day in Hoi An, and so we picked up our clothes from the tailor’s and went to the beach. The beach was beautiful, but I (like a fool) took no pictures DESPITE having my camera with me. Met some Israelis on vacation just after finishing their mandatory Army service, ate some squid fresh from the ocean, swam, and generally relaxed. It is my vacation, I am occasionally allowed to just blow a day at the beach.

That evening, we went back to Danang only to find that our flight had been delayed FOUR HOURS- supposed to leave at 7, in fact were scheduled to leave at 11. So we waited, and while we waited, I tried Mystery Item 3 on my Weird Stuff I Ate This Trip list.

There is a special kind of coffee that they only drink in Vietnam. All Vietnamese coffee is delicious- I couldn’t get enough of the stuff- but this is supposed to be particularly good. They select the finest crop of the year, and feed the beans to a certain species of weasel. When the weasel has digested the beans and is, well, done with them, they go in and extract the beans from the excrement. These beans, fermented by the weasel’s stomach, make the crème de la crème of Vietnamese coffee. So I bought some, and tried it.

It was a complex, layered flavor. I, despite myself, enjoyed it greatly. I just have one nagging question:

WHO THOUGHT OF THIS? Who dove into a pile of weasel excrement and said “Hey! Let’s brew this! I bet this would taste absolutely delicious!”

Whoever it is, I’m in their debt. That was some delicious coffee, and it made the stupidly long wait go by that much faster.

By the time we finally got back to our hotel in Ho Chi Minh City, it was 1:30 in the morning.

The next day, it was back on the bike. We wanted to go to the Cu Chi Tunnels, but we missed the tourbus (slept in) and didn’t want to contract a private driver (so much money!)… so we took our lives into our hands, and motorbiked Saigon. Armed with a map and a bike (a bike with a broken speedometer, but a bike), we set out to do battle with the swarm of crazy traffic that I had earlier described. It took us two hours to get out to the tunnels. At one point, we were so lost that we stopped at this little roadside café, and paid the owner’s son two dollars to show us, on his motorbike, how to get back to the main road. My limited Vietnamese vocab was stretched to the absolute limit, and we managed somehow to make it to the Cu Chi Tunnel system.

The tunnels are what the Viet Cong used to move undetected around the countryside. It’s a spider’s web of paths and houses that used every innovation they could think of- venting systems, enclosed ovens that could store up smoke to be released at night (when it wouldn’t tip off spotters), tricks, traps, the whole deal. When we arrived, we were first shown around the Cu Chi Resistance Village, which was set up kind of like a Disney Vietnam Funland.

You could mill grain, just like a member of the village resistance!

Stand by an American APC! I’m not sure if you can see it even if you blow up the picture, but the reason I’m standing here is to indicate the writing on the side; it says “Oh Carol”, which I wasn’t quite prepared to decipher. Anybody out there in TV Land know?

You could also have your picture taken with the Cu Chi Guerilla mannequins, but that seemed a touch too much. Similarly, there was a shooting range at the end of the tour where you could fire any number of Vietnam-era weaponry- M-16s, AK-47s, the whole works. After Hiroshima and what I’d already seen in Vietnam, I was perfectly happy living my life without firing an assault rifle- this stuff does quite well at taking your taste for wanton violence. (That, and they wanted a dollar a bullet, minimum 10! Come on, now!)

Next on the tour came the Propaganda Room.

They sat us down here, again under the watchful eyes of Uncle Ho, to view a video about the Cu Chi Guerillas. It was, in short, atrocious. I quote: “This is Lu Li. She is short- too short to see out of the trenches- but her hatred for Americans lifts her into the sky! She was awarded the title American Killer Hero.” It was narrated by some French guy- his accent was wonderfully atrocious- and it was the most slanted, hateful reporting I’ve seen since Bill O’Reilly. There was, by chance, an American with us when we were watching the film and touring the tunnels. Turns out he was a Vietnam vet, and we both laughed about the crazy, hyperbolic “American Killer Hero” stuff after the film was over. It was so angry it was silly.

Funny thing? The tour guide/guard and the veteran proceeded to chat about the site and the war like old friends, all through the tour of the tunnels. These tunnels are REALLY small, despite being expanded a touch for tourists- it’s strictly hands-and-knees suck-in-your-gut business. We were served tea and tapioca in one of the chambers- not tapioca pudding, but chunks of the tapioca plant. Not bad. Not too good, if that’s all you could eat, but not bad as a late afternoon snack.

On the way back, Richelle caught a ride with the American war vet and his wife, and I rode the bike back alone. This is just as well- it was rush hour. If someone asks you to drive a motorbike through Saigon rush hour, you would be wise to decline. Going too fast places you in mortal danger. Too slow? Mortal danger again. Lots of fun, though. Just not fun I’d like to have twice.

That evening, my traveling companion, Richelle, returned to Japan and left me to spend my last three days in Vietnam alone. I signed up for a two-day tour of the Mekong Delta, and planned to spend the last day catching up on things I had missed in HCMC.

That evening, I went for a walk out to get some dinner along the Saigon River. I was accosted mid-walk by a little girl wanting me to buy some gum. I had long ago given up on ignoring these kids, and decided instead to amuse them until they gave up. So I danced with her, she play-fought with me, we ran around and acted like big idiots until a member of her family (not her mom- her mother was watching all this) came up and asked me if I lived in Vietnam. She took my email address, asked me out to coffee. She wasn’t too happy to hear that I was leaving in a few days. I gave the kid a five-yen coin, by way of a gift (kids usually love coins from other countries, and the trick has worked on SO MANY of these kids thus far this trip- they forget what they’re selling and just become kids again) but she laughed, dropped it into my shirt pocket and said “No, Vietnamese.” She then sat on my foot and held onto my leg, staying there for half a block as I walked away. Cute kid.

Next morning, I hopped on the bus to go to the Mekong Delta. I was on there with about twenty other foreigners- my new 20 best friends for the next two days. Everybody was pretty cool- some Americans, a few British, a few Aussies, some Canadians, a pair of Israelis, and two Spaniards. Took awhile for people to open up and start talking, but this is the way of any group of people dropped into a bus with little to no introduction. The bus ride was about three hours, followed by a boat ride of about 45 minutes before we stopped for lunch.

Some houses on the Mekong.

We stopped in a small village to visit the fruit market.

Tell me he doesn’t look guilty- like he shouldn’t be doing whatever he’s doing.

As we traveled the river, every so often we’d come across these floating houses. The people who live on the water like this use a system of cages in the foundation of their houses to catch fish and supplement their food supply.

Cute kid in a boat!

Mekong Swimmer!

Foliage!

We visited a native village where they make coconut candy, honeybee tea and banana wine. Coconut candy is delicious- just coconut oil, honey, and water, stirred and boiled ‘till it hardens. Honeybee tea is also pretty good, but the method of manufacture is a little scary…

Yep. Bees.

Banana wine is more accurately termed banana whiskey- or just plain paint thinner. It’s the kind of drink big, strapping lads claim will put hair on your chest.

While we were enjoying our bee tea and coconut candies, a group of folk musicians came by and rocked out for us. The Vietnamese guitar is a funny thing- they scoop out the area between each fret until it’s a deep, concave cup- makes the string ring differently, evidently, and lends a really twangy, tinny sound to the guitar.

We made our way back to the boat, and then onto a ferry to take us to the next piece of the delta, where we would stay the night.

Spanish people! On the ferry!

(They, incidentally, were cool folks. Musicians and wanderers- Vietnam’s the latest in their “part-time-jobs to travel the world” scheme.)

Sunset on the delta.

That night, as I was walking to dinner with a few new friends, we passed a man on the sidewalk giving a peculiar kind of massage. He was taking cups- glass cups- and passing a lit brand underneath them for a second before pressing them against the back of his customer/victim. We stood and watched for a moment, and he grinned. The man motioned for me to sit down, and pulled my sleeve up, and stuck a cup to my shoulder. Seems that when the flame passes under the cup, it burns away the oxygen and creates a vacuum. This creates a great deal of suction when the cup is applied to the skin, which evidently pulls the blood to the surface and cleans away toxins.

So we think “wow, that was interesting” and go to dinner. For dinner, I order a Delta specialty: snake satay. The whole time, I’ve got a spot the size of a coke can on my shoulder. On the way back, he was still at it, but one of the reed mats was empty. After some quick bargaining. I took my shirt off and laid down. WARNING: THE FOLLOWING IS NOT FOR THE FAINT OF HEART.

So here I am, relatively unmarked.

Just the one. Man, I’m a skinny whiteboy.

All right, so then…

And then…

Look at how far the skin is drawn up inside the cups. This is… terrifying, now that I see it myself.

Then he reapplies the cups in ANOTHER place! In this shot, you can see him sticking the brand underneath to burn out the oxygen.

Then he put them on my chest! Ack!

Final result: Polka dots. They’re STILL ON ME- four days later. I’ll keep you posted as to how this ends up- or, if they’re still around the next time I see you (whoever “you” are), I’ll just show you. *UPDATE* The marks faded after about a week and a half. They didn't hurt until the very end, where there was nothing left but weird bruises.

So the next day, we went to the floating market. We didn’t get out of the boat and try and barter- what were we going to do with fifty kilos of watermelons? It was not a retail floating market. Some guy did try to sell us Coca-Cola, boat to boat…

After the floating market, we went to a rice paper workshop. Ever wonder how they make rice paper? All right, here ya go.

Step 1: Grind rice flour. Add water to make a sticky soup. Spread soup onto a piece of wet cloth stretched out over a hot fire.

Cover.

Wait.

Pick up mixture with your special rice-paper-wiffle-bat.

Picking up…

And away!

Spread onto reed mats to bake in the sun.

After the rice paper workshop (they then use the rice paper to make spring rolls, candy wrappers, what have you) we went to a little village whose sole purpose in existence was to house the coffee shop that paid our tour company money to bring us by there. Literally, that was it. That and a metal shop. Oh, and a cute kid.

With that, it was back on the bus and back to Ho Chi Minh City.

So five hours later, it was time to grab some food, hang out in the park, talk with some local people and generally have a good low-key evening. The next day was my last, so I really had to have one last good day.

Biker boys- two young guys in front of the local moto repair shop

So I went to HCMC’s Chinatown- Cholon. There are all sorts of interesting historical notes tied to this part of town- like the fact that it is only now being repopulated with Chinese people, as they all fled when the American War ended (this is what they call the Vietnam War. Wouldn’t make much sense to call it Vietnam, from their perspective) and are now brave enough to come back and reclaim the family business.

I got to Chinatown in a cyclo (xich lo in Vietnamese)- that strange pedicab number. It’s a bicycle in back, baby carriage in front. I never want to travel that way again. It makes me feel too colonial somehow, in a way that a taxi does not.

It did give me a good chance to snap some non-busy HCMC traffic, though. This is at a dead time- just before the lunch rush.

Here’s the shoe section of the Chinatown covered market. Nothing for sale in this picture is not a shoe.

Market courtyard.

It’s a big Chinese lion, but I don’t know why it’s got a ball in it’s mouth. Maybe this celestial lion plays fetch.

I spent the rest of the day touring temples- there are two particularly old ones in Cholon.

Here’s one…

And here’s the other. The spirals hanging from the ceiling are incense- they are hung (like the guy on lower right is doing) with the name of the purchaser and their prayer attached.

The signcarver’s hallway.

The last temple I visited was a Catholic church. Strange thing, though- the priests all spoke French. No English at all. Nice guys, though.

Just before I left Vietnam, I came across these guys, playing Chinese Chess in the street. I had seen various pairs of men playing the whole trip, but this is a pretty spectator-heavy game. Everyone was offering advice and placing bets while the two men tried to concentrate- pretty funny.

After this, and a little light dinner, I wandered past a circus (wow!) and a bunch of kids playing soccer with a half-deflated ball. Of course, when they asked, I joined in. More people this past week called out to me, talked to me, and generally badgered me than in my ENTIRE stay in Japan- Vietnam’s definitely friendlier than I thought it would be.

Six hours and one overnight flight later, it’s back to Japanese soil, people who speak a language I comprehend (well, more than Vietnamese, anyways) and life returns to … normal in Japan. Which is pretty out there, anywhere else.

Past few weeks have been insanely busy- family came and went, we're on our way to Kyushu this weekend, and there will be many more "Andrew-gets-lost-in-foreign-country" stories to come. Oh, and I teach sometimes.

pax

The Great Escape Part 2: Australia

2006-04-11T07:04:00.000-04:00

5:45 AM: First train leaving Tehara station.

6:05 AM: First “Haruka” limited express train to Osaka Kansai Airport.

7:45 AM: Train arrives at Kansai Airport.

8:30 AM: Check-in for flight to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

10:30 AM: Plane leaves.

2:00 PM Vietnam Time (2 hours behind Japan Time): Land in Ho Chi Minh City.

11:00 PM Vietnam Time: Flight Leaves for Melbourne, Australia.

11:00 AM Australia Time (different, somehow, from Vietnam, but how?): Land in Melbourne, Australia.

I am here to tell you- to testify, to yell to the mountains: An eight-hour layover in Ho Chi Minh Airport, voted “Most Boring Airport On Earth” by an independent committee (me and two other foreigners enroute from Japan) is NOT worth whatever money you save by agreeing to have your flight routed through HCMC. Add to that that it took over 24 hours for me to get to Melbourne, and I begin to wish I was a rich man who could afford to fly direct (check the prices on orbitz, and you’ll see why we sat for 8 hours in HCMC)- there is NOTHING to do at this place, and the only stores in the waiting area accept nothing but US dollars. No yen, and no Vietnamese Dong, as it’s illegal to take that out of the country, so your Foreign Exchange won’t even give you some before you go. In short: Don’t do it.

I ended up spending just over 2 days in Melbourne. Day 1 was “Explore the City!” day- it’s a beautiful place, but my camera was still packed away, so I’ve got only memories, and no pictures. It’s impressive how the mind functions after being so long away from an English-speaking country; it seems as if everyone you hear is talking just to you. Eavesdropping, for the first few minutes, isn’t a conscious thing, but since suddenly this vast world of effortless understanding has opened up to you, it’s impossible to tune it out or ignore it.

In the exploration of the city, I got to see the aftereffects of the Commonwealth Games, which had ended just a few days before. Got to poke around some impressive architecture- Federation Square, a big church, a few interesting train stations. Got to enjoy Western-sized portions of food. Had a kangaroo steak- tastes like jumpy beef. There are pictures, but they’re trapped on Richelle’s camera- Richelle being my traveling companion for this trip, she’ll feature later in the Vietnam pictures.

The next day, I went on a package tour out to see the Little Penguins. The Little Penguins (always in caps) march in from the sea in big packs every night to get back to their nests on Phillip Island. It’s cute- they’re tiny. The tour took all day- first, we went to an animal park, which showed off koalas, a wombat (the fat dude in the picture), a Tasmanian devil, dingoes, ostriches, wallabies and kangaroos (all of which, save for the devil and the wombat, you get to feed by hand),

followed by a long walk on the beach,

a trip to a seal nesting ground (where we saw no seals- they must have been out) and then finally to Phillip Island to see the penguins. In short, it was like an amusement park ride: fun to experience, boring to tell about, as the chances for real adventure and interesting stories were limited to the aims and directions of our guide, a jocular Aussie who played to as many Steve Irwin stereotypes as humanly possible. Sidenote: Customs in Australia has some really strict quarantine laws. Explaining these laws in a happy, instructional video is our good friend the Crocodile Hunter, who plays with the contraband-sniffing beagles and emphasizes how important it is to “Declare (pronounced: Declayah) or Beware (bewayah)”, as the fine for violating this is 30 grand Australian dollahs. Dollars. Whatevah.

So with that tour out of the way, we caught the last train back to the house where we were staying (in a ‘burb called Sunshine that looked like, frankly, a twisted Aussie reflection of a few ‘burbs I’ve seen in Detroit- no, not the nice ones) and crashed out in a tent in the backyard. The next day, it was off to Vietnam, in my mind the main attraction. I liked Australia, but it was a friendly, easy, guided, English-speaking walk in the park. Vietnam was different. Very different.

The Great Escape Part 1: Hiroshima

2006-04-11T06:22:00.000-04:00

The pictures in this section were liberally stolen from the cameras of Veronica and her sister, Laura.

Friday, after closing ceremonies at Ritto Nishi Jr. High (we cleaned the school top-to-bottom, the principal gave another depressing speech about the inexorable onward march of time, and a good time was had by all), we kicked off the nonstop madcap Spring Break by jumping on the first Shinkansen headed south. Destination?

No, not Shin-Osaka. Not Hakata either. The first gold train on that list goes straight to Hiroshima. So we loaded up on train-station sushi

(hint: the leaf wrapping is inedible, but if you are dumb enough to eat some, it tastes kinda like mint) and leapt onto the Shinkansen. Two hours later…

Now, I’ll be perfectly candid when I tell you I had no idea what to expect. My mental image of Hiroshima was a smoking crater- a desolate atomic wasteland- despite the fact that I knew, intellectually, that it has been over 50 years and that reconstruction began mere months after the bomb fell. It turns out that modern Hiroshima is a wonderfully reconstructed, beautiful city filled with the same boundless optimism that infects the rest of Japan, in perhaps even greater quantities than cities further north- we’re looking at you, Tokyo. All the same, be warned that the museums we visited and sights we saw are REALLY disturbing- if it’s a touchy subject with you, feel free to skip the section below labeled PEACE PARK- when it’s young-child-friendly again, I’ll let you know with more bold text.

So the first night was spent checking into our hostel, and then exploring the city a touch by night. The above picture was taken in the market district.

. The next morning, we woke up early and took a streetcar (I wish I could say it was named Desire, I really do) to the Peace Park- a huge, grassy park about 250 meters southwest of the hypocenter.

This is the Bomb Dome, located just across the river from the Peace Park. They’ve reinforced it a few times, to keep it looking just the way it did after the bomb dropped, but otherwise they’ve just left it alone. It is the creepiest building I have ever seen, despite the beautiful weather. The skeletal dome on top used to be covered in a distinctive green copper, making it one of the prewar landmarks that everybody knew about. Just a few steps from here is the Students’ Monument.

This one commemorates all the students that were pressed into service at the time of the explosion- human resources were low even before the explosion, and schoolkids were not exempt from assisting the war effort. A lot of them were in the target area when the bomb went off.

Across the river is the famous “Sayaka Memorial”- the little girl who believed that folding paper cranes would cure her of her radiation-induced leukemia. She didn’t manage to fold all the cranes she needed, so her classmates finished the job after she passed away, and built a statue in the Peace Park for her memory. Ever since, schoolchildren have brought TONS of paper cranes to the memorial- so many that the city has erected a bunch of glass cases (like the one above) to hold them all. There are registration cards for where you’re from and how many you’ve folded- and almost all the cases are stuffed full to overflowing.

Here’s the main promenade. There’s more around in the Peace Park than this, including a cinerarium (look it up) and a monument to the Korean victims of the bomb, but in the interests of time and my psyche, we’ll skip ahead a bit. The building at the end of this long walk is the Peace Museum- admission: 50 yen (‘bout 40 cents). In front is a small arch- that’s the cenotaph, holding a registry of all the victim’s names. As people who were affected by the bomb pass away, they get added to the registry. In front of that, closest to the camera, is a flame (can’t really see it from here) that will burn until the world demolishes the last of the nuclear weapons.

The Peace Museum tells an in-depth story of exactly what happened that morning, including video testimonies of the victims, artifacts that survived the bomb, medical supplies, keloid scars in formaldehyde, human shadows etched into concrete, steel doors twisted by heat and shockwaves, stopped watches (all at 8:15, the time of the blast)- a real-life hall of horrors. There’s also a wall covered in hundreds of letters- the Mayor of Hiroshima has written a formal protest every time a country tests a nuclear weapon. The manner of these letters are always the same- “Dear Mr. Ambassador of (The United States, France, Great Britain, Russia), your country tested a nuclear weapon at (place) (time). I am writing to inform you of my sincere wish that you would just give this crazy business up. Trust me, I know how these things end. Sincerely, The Mayor Of Hiroshima.” Well, something to that effect, anyways. It’s haunting, and there are things in that building I don’t think I’ll ever forget.

Don’t get me wrong, though. The overall tone is one of rebuilding, and moving forward. It’s important that they burn that flame in hopes of nuclear disarmament, and that they keep writing letters, and that admission to the museum is so cheap that anyone in the world could come in. They just want people to know, to remember, and to first and foremost realize how destructive these weapons are. Not a whole lot of bitterness- in fact, as mentioned before, the city is mind-bogglingly optimistic. There’s a corridor in the shopping district where, as soon as the stores have closed for the night, entire TRIBES of street musicians set up and hold concerts (for free, mind you, as begging for money is outlawed without a permit) to gaggles of enthusiastic schoolgirls who sit in neat rows in front of their erstwhile rockstars. Not once did I get an askance look for being Western nor even disapproval when they asked me where I was from and I answered “America.” They were genuinely happy we were there. So we enjoyed a late lunch, bought some pastries from Anderson’s (which is both a bakery AND the Danish Consulate in Japan- how cool is that?) and walked down the river to have a bit of a picnic. Saw a few temples, a big cool park full of people playing various outdoorsy sports, and returned to the hotel to catch a few hours before hopping on the ferry in the morning to go to Miyajima.

HEY LOOK! IT’S SAFE! ALL DONE TALKING ABOUT ATOMIC TRAGEDY!

So. Off the coast of Hiroshima is Hiroshima’s polar opposite: Miyajima. A holy island where, in accordance with strict Shinto law, no-one has ever given birth or died. It’s forbidden. You’ve all seen pictures of this place, but here’s one more that might jog your memory:

This is the island with the famous floating shrine-gate. It’s a beautiful place- mountainous, heavily forested, and undeveloped save for a thin strip around the edge of the island- everything else is little huts, temples and shrines along the paths up to the top. We climbed two out of the three mountains in less than a day, so they’re not craaazy big or anything, but they are QUITE nice. A slide-show follows, to illustrate the cool things on the island- I think it might serve me well to just get out of the way for a minute here. See you when you’ve flipped through the pictures.

So. Miyajima. Sacred Island, big gate, fun place. Nice, eh?

We found (halfway up the island) a Japanese hiker who lived in Mexico and spoke perfect Spanish- awesome and strange. Not that I speak any Spanish to brag about, but I love unusual multilingual conversation.

So after a fun day in the woods, we hopped back on the Shinkansen and wound our way back to Shiga. I bid the girls goodnight and got four hours of sleep before the big trip began in earnest.

-fin-

Still alive (and stalling for time!)

2006-04-10T04:24:00.000-04:00

After a spring break adventure spanning three countries, two continents and three more entries on the Weird Food I've Eaten list (Kangaroo, Snake, and a mystery delicacy to be explained in the next post) I have returned home alive. I've got three picture CD's full of info and pages upon pages of story to tell- I'll be working on one monster post to put up sometime in the near future. All you really need to know right now is that it was AWESOME, and that details are (I PROMISE) forthcoming.

Here's a few teaser pictures to tide you over- one from each country! Thematic!

mountains on the island of Miyajima, off the coast of Hiroshima, Japan

Beach near Melbourne, Australia

busy street in front of the Ben Thanh Market, District 1 (Saigon), Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

The Good Stuff

2006-03-16T23:03:00.000-05:00

Head over to my man The Atomic Yak's blog for great pictures of the Sagicho Matsuri- the festival I mentioned involving parade floats and fiery violence- as well as some good shots of the rest of the Foreign Legionnaires. The Yak's sceptred-isle honed photography skills far outweigh my own- and the volume of shots he has is nigh unto alarming. Check it out- unless the concept of all-singing, all-dancing, all-burning giant sculpture borne on the backs of drag queens fails to capture your imagination.

If that is the case, I weep for what's left of your sense of wonder.

Catching Up- LONG POST

2006-03-15T23:20:00.000-05:00

Give yourself some time for this one- if it took me forever to write, it'll take you forever to read.

Disclaimer: Most of the In Kyoto pictures are courtesy of Tonia and her awesome camera. The festival in Hachiman is all cellphone, all the time.

First night: Friday, March 10^th, 2006. 10:30 pm.

I returned home from an evening of delicious, slightly odd dinner (note: Horse sashimi tastes pretty good. Kinda smoky, buttery flavor; absolutely nothing like chowing down on Mr. Ed) to find five large bags sitting on the front porch of my house- with no owners. It seems that Jon and Tonia have decided to take me up on my offer to introduce them to the myriad charms of Kyoto. Only problem? The bags were there, but the people weren’t. Figuring that the only place in town that Jon and Tonia know is the 7-11, I walked down the street calling for my lost foreign sheep, and found them fairly quickly. Ritto’s a small town.

Morning: Saturday, March 11^th, 2006. 8:00 am.

We set out early for a lightning circle tour of Kyoto. First two sites of the day: Kinkakuji (the golden palace) and Ryoanji (the big Zen Garden). We donated money to the White Snake God that lives behind the Golden Pavilion, witnessed ninjitsu gutter-cleaning at Ryoanji, and discovered that the big, cool Zen Garden was being refurbished for preservation issues, and as such all tarped up. No fun. The West Garden (which I have never seen) was open, though, and we got to see the burial site of the temple’s patron and founder. There was one shot in particular- this tea offering to the sun goddess Ameratsu- that made me smile. Faith comes in a vending machine. After Ryoanji, we wandered south, intending to pass through a large park marked only as a big grey blotch on my map and end up at Hanazono Station.

Seems that this large, unmarked park is in fact a temple complex that adjoins to the NHK “Love Village”, a large period-piece movie and TV show set where they shoot Samurai flicks. We managed to sneak in behind a tour group and into the great hall of a temple that was locked until the moment we strolled up- and I’m pretty glad we did, as the ceiling of the temple was covered entirely by a charcoal painting of a Dragon of Heaven, and the temple itself boasted the Oldest Bell In Japan. Evidently, this somehow affects the quality of ring that emanates from the bell- striations in the copper or something. Who knows- either way, it was awesome to ninja in behind a tour group (like Tonia, Jon and I weren’t the MOST OBVIOUS PEOPLE IN THE ROOM) and see something I’d otherwise have missed. After stumbling across and through the temple and Love Village, we found an oh-so-creepy playground in a graveyard and decided to run, not walk, to the station and beat feet across to East Kyoto.

In the East, we visited my favorite temple (Kiyomizudera) and its surrounding market complex. The markets are tiny, winding streets reaching up the mountain to the temple, and the temple itself had an area open that previous to this had been all closed off every time I had been there. It’s a pagoda- an old, weathered, rusted, decayed pagoda. I love it.Here’s the bell. Niiice.

In a hole in a tree in front of the pagoda,

Jon spotted a glint of something. It turned out to be the tiniest shrine I have ever seen- the one-yen coins in this picture are about the size of dimes, for reference- and as such I am bringing the tiniest curse upon myself from the tiniest god by posting the picture here. In recompense, we left it an offering, stacked precariously on top of the rest of the one-yen coins. We joked for the rest of the day that it was that offering that found us all this cool stuff.

Jon, Tonia and I partook of the sacred mountain spring water- I figure it probably washed away the curse of the tiny god. Maybe the tiny god likes publicity- I haven’t felt any ancient wrath as of yet.

After Kiyomizudera, we wandered north through Gion until we hit Chion Temple- this is not me trying to be funny, these are their names- but before we could get there, we ran into a huge crowd of people. Seems Saturday was the kickoff day for “Hanatouro”, the yearly Cherry Blossom festival. We were still too early to catch the cherry blossoms, but we did see a LOT of lanterns stacked on the sides of the road and a really cool night art festival in Marutamachi Park, behind the Yasaka Shrine. The whole district was fairly packed with people- surprising, since the blossoms really hadn’t had a chance to get started yet.

We got Jon some takoyaki (the fried octopus balls) and steered him through the shrine and out into the street, where Tonia got (in my opinion) the coolest picture of the weekend:

That’s pretty much Kyoto. The rest of the night was spent scrounging up food and showing off the Sanjo district, whose praises I have sung quite sufficiently in the past.

Some bathrooms are awesome, like spaceships.

So anyways, I sent them on their way the next morning, off to see a festival in Nara (and see the deer and giant Buddha that make that city the awesome thing that it is), and I went to work. Well, kinda.

Sunday was Kids Day at the Ritto Community Center, which meant a little festival for birth-through-elementary-school kids. Some local highschoolers came in and taught breakdancing, and I was set up with a booth to sell candy for 10 yen a hit out in the hallway. The schtick? No Japanese could be spoken at my booth. So I was lucky enough to have three friends come by to help out (shout-out-roll-call: Miranda, Sara, and Veronica, you guys are awesome) and we cavorted and acted the fool with the kiddies all day.

Japanese children are crazy cute. They are also obsessed with touching, punching, holding, climbing, and sitting on you. Fair warning for anyone planning to teach elementary school here in the Land of the Rising Sun. Sunday went off kancho-free, for those of you concerned.

Sunday night was CRAZY. There was a festival in Omi-Hachiman that evening- the Foreign Legion attended en masse. The purpose of this festival was the display of giant parade floats, carried via interlocked logs on the shoulders of thirty cross-dressing men. The men, fortified with sake and eyeliner, hauled the floats up a street in front of the shrine (all the while screaming “Hasse! Masse!” which translates roughly to “heave-ho!”) and rotated them there to show them off.

Well, at least that was the purpose of the first twenty minutes of the festival. The rest of the festival was spent setting these floats on fire.

While each float burns, the men who carried it (and the crowd around them) dance in circles around the flames, jubilantly toasting each other with more sake and singing. Evidently, the day before, they jousted with these things, ramming them into each other to attempt to topple the other team’s float. This festival has, in the recent past, suffered casualties. People DIE doing this. Why they keep doing it is a question I cannot answer.

the flames die out

There’s a story behind the carnage, but it’s patchy and the people I asked on the street only knew bits and pieces. Yes, the Japanese people. Yes, I asked the people actively involved- and they DIDN’T KNOW EXACTLY WHY they were doing this. A touch concerning, to say the least. You could find the real answers on the internet, but the street gossip just seems so interesting I don’t want to taint it with any actual knowledge.

So here’s the story: A long time ago, a local feudal lord (nobody remembers who) had to escape from an assassin (nobody remembers why). So he dressed in drag and hid among women, and returned triumphant to the throne in some manner or another (nobody remembers how). FACT: All the floats this year were adorned with very realistic dog mannequins. This is because this year is the year of the Dog. Watching these hounds get consumed by flame was… shocking. The floats are patterned after the portable shrines that all feudal lords (kinda like the guy mentioned above) carry around to please the gods. I have yet to receive an answer as to why they get set on fire. Nobody knows.

To change attitudes entirely, Tuesday was graduation at Ritto Nishi JHS. The differences between an American graduation and a Japanese graduation can be summed up thusly:

There is no joy in a Japanese graduation. None. It is a somber, black and white ceremony that is more akin to a funeral for the entire graduating class than a celebration of accomplishment. Black and white are, in fact, the colors of the day; all the students wear their standard uniforms, adorned with a single flower, and all the teachers dress in black and white suits and dresses. One teacher was the exception this year- a fall kimono of oranges and greys. She stood out like a flower in a graveyard.

After the ceremony (which was long- lots of speeches) the entire school turned out to wish the third-graders well and say goodbye- we all marched outside (in the snow) and waved them off, and took pictures with them. I bounced from group to group, saying goodbye to my students, and managed to snap a few quick cellphone pics.

These are my kids. I’ll miss ‘em. The new batch of first graders come in after Spring Break- next week is the last week of school. In the meantime, the school feels pretty empty.

So. That was a crazy long update- sorry, guys. Hopefully, I’ll have more like this- adventure is GREAT. Be on the lookout for the inevitable “How could I have forgotten _____________?!!” post that should be arriving in a few hours.

parting shots
we're going to try to clear some of the backlog by including a few pictures that didn't fit anywhere else at the end of some of these posts.
no refunds or exchanges, some restrictions may apply. Offer not valid in countries ending with -ziewackobounds.
Down-home "country antique store", Moriyama-shi, Shiga-ken

concrete "boats" in Kamogawa (the Kamo River)

pax

Next: Pictures

2006-03-07T21:18:00.000-05:00

Call this a solemn promise to download the contents of my camera tomorrow at work- I've got a backlog of pictures and the weather here in the Kansai area is turning absolutely beautiful. The kerosene heaters and kotatsu hot-lamp tables are all scurrying back into the closets at the first sign of spring like surprised cockroaches, and my lament of "it's the same temperature inside as outside" has been replaced with an exultation containing the exact same text.

I spent the last weekend bumming around Kyoto- visiting little cafes, leaping across stepping-stones in the river, enjoying the shock of shrines sneaking up behind me in unexpected places. There are pictures. They're trapped on my cameraphone.

Sunday evening, I recieved some visitors- Jon and Tonia, from Kalamazoo, MI. There's something both grounding and surreal seeing people I knew in the US here in Japan. We took them out for okonomiyaki, and afterwards picked up some dessert from the convenience store to be enjoyed on the sly in a little cafe near Kyoto station. They're staying in the country for a week, touring Tokyo, and I might be enlisted as a tour guide when they come back to my part of the country on their way towards Nara.

The kids graduate next week- for now, there's a lot of free time (as lessons wind down), outdoor lunches, and since the last of the highschool exams are today, the students are all either relaxed or resigned, and as such pretty happy to talk. Some are going to highschools where I know the foreign teachers- I'm a bit embarassed, as they don't speak too well, and it just might be partly my fault.

Planning this week is in high gear for the adventures at the end of this month; Australia and Vietnam. Three days in Oz followed by a week and a half in and around Ho Chi Minh City (nee: Saigon) with possible trips North into the jungles and tunnels. It's going to be nuts: watch this space for more adventures.

Recent Updates Make the Work Day Faster

2006-03-01T01:55:00.000-05:00

The word of the day shall be loquacious.

So everyone's in a meeting today- I'm not invited, but I'm also not allowed to go home. Funny, eh? So I'm taking a break from the mountains of student reflection papers to let you in on a touch of the good work we're doing over here. As you can see by the following quotes from student papers, as far as English instruction goes, I'm a horrific failure.

The kids have just finished reading a depressing little story called The Fall Of Freddie the Leaf. The linked document is a fulltext of the story as written by Leo Buscaglia- the edition my students slugged through is slimmed down for the ESL community. It's developed a bit of a cult following here in Japan- the Japanese-language edition sells like crazy, and I've been told that it was in fact originally a Japanese story (fun fact: I have been told on multiple occasions with perfect seriousness that absolutely all stories were "originally Japanese"- the West hasn't come up with something on its own since the beginning of time. This includes the Bible. Willy Wonka? Japanese first. Roald Dahl or Roo-ru-do Dah-ru must be spinning in that grave of his)- with a name like Buscaglia, how could it NOT be Japanese?

Anyways, so they plowed through this real feel-good story about death, and then wrote short reflection pieces on how it made them feel, what they got out of the experience. All of my kids write reflection pieces, or talk about them in our debriefs- an idea that I blatantly have stolen from the ancestral masters over at Project Adventure (FYI: Originally a Japanese Company, should you ask my coworkers)- we debrief kids about every silly game we play, and believe it or not it's churning out some pretty interesting uses of the language. For example:

"When I go to sleep, I want to be smile... making people happy is important."

This is okay. This is not too strange- just MILDLY creepy, when you factor in that the story (above) uses sleep as a metaphor for death. This is the exception to the rule.

"This story is very short. So it story didn't make us boring."

"I'm good to read this story. Became very hot mind. I want to study hard in High School."

"I want to find my purpose in life. And I want to quietly die."

"I had the good things. I want to read it again."

"I feel something. I understand. A leaf give many happy for people."

"I think 'Change is Nature' is nice words. Because this words say real."

"I hope Freddie meet Daniel again. I think Freddie was happy and died."

These poor kids are TOO YOUNG to be thinking about how and when they want to kick it. Tragedy and psychiatric bills for them, strangely touching comedy gold for me.

There is one quote- just one (though I love "hot mind" up there)- that I think I'm going to treasure for the rest of my life.

"Art is long, life is short. I don't know what I mean."

I love my kids.
pax

Food of the Day

2006-02-28T02:13:00.000-05:00

Blogging from work still carries a very guerilla feel- I'll keep this short, but there are sometimes things that happen that I need to let people know about.

Friday night, in the midst of some aimless wandering in Kusatsu (the small town next door to Ritto), I came across what appeared, for all intents and purposes, to be a Steak and Shake in the middle of rural Japan. It was a small shop sandwiched between a karaoke bar and someone's house, and upon entering (and removing my shoes in exchange for a set of slippers owned by the house), I stepped up onto the immaculate black-and-white checkerboard floor and into the 1950's as viewed through a broken funhouse mirror. Every surface was bedecked with oversized black-and-white headshots of celebrities. Audrey Hepburn smoldered over the entrance, James Dean reclined over the jukebox, and clean-shaven waxed-hair hotrodders lounged in their frames over the widescreen plasma TV. The proprietors, a Japanese oldies rocker (his guitar was neatly packed in its case between two amps- one, petite and clean, and the other a bass cabinet roughly the size of a fat man's wardrobe) and his Filipino wife walked up, and welcomed us into the empty shop in perfect, immaculate English. Next to the jukebox was the store's only nod to its country of residence- a potted bamboo plant.

The owner, evidently, had fallen in love with America of the 1950's when he was but a child- he saw American Graffiti when he was in Middle School, and caught the bug HARD. He owns a beautiful pink 1959 convertible Caddy. His picture, with his car, features prominently in a vintage car magazine he keeps in a cupboard three feet from the jukebox. His oldies band plays every other Sunday- the concerts coincide with the meetings of his vintage car club. This store is the realization of a long childhood dream. What, pray tell, do they serve?

Okonomiyaki. Yep. Japanese egg pancakes. It is, to my knowledge, the only 1950's-themed squid and pork soba pancake establishment in existence. Pictures are forthcoming- no way to download them onto the work computer, and I've got to go back to get some more anyways.

I can't make this stuff up. If only I could...
pax

Where the heck have I been?

2006-02-26T23:39:00.000-05:00

Busy.

We've entered the crazy season, as far as school in Japan goes. The third graders are studying like demons for their highschool entrance tests, and last week at Hayama Junior High was an exam week. Normally, this would mean no class- but I got the chance to go teach elementary school again. My respect for the elementary schoolteachers of the world has leapt to unimaginable heights- it's a never-ending song and dance show, and the teachers I see in the classroom (the endless founts of energy and enthusiasm) are completely different people than the grey shapes I saw slumped in the teacher's office. Perhaps I just made it there on a bad day. Everyone was happy- everyone seems to enjoy their jobs- but they also seem to crash HARD the moment class ends. The kids don't seem to notice.

The kids, in fact, are terrifyingly charming. Last week, while I was up doing my song and dance, I was approached by a pair of little girls who, in perfect English, asked my name and how I was doing. Turns out these girls are from Brazil and Peru, and just wanted to talk- they're having a hard time getting along with their classmates, they get a bit of flak for being foreign- and were thrilled as anything to have an English-speaking teacher around. We chatted for awhile about how much we missed stuff from home, and then they both wandered back to class. They were fourth-graders. The moment they walked away, I was swarmed by kids from the other classes; holding their hands out for handshakes, producing tiny pencils and slips of paper for me to sign, asking me to jump and touch the ceiling, and generally treating me as if I were an alien rockstar that had just crawled from a crater (rather than an alien teacher that had flown Northwest like everybody else).

The middle school kids are just as cool, but for different reasons. What with the testing in progress and graduation just around the corner, a sense of fatalism and The Long Goodbye has settled over the school. For most of February, I was at Hayama Jr. High- a fifteen-minute bikeride through a few ricefields away from my house. I've since been transferred to the next school- which means I won't see the Hayama 3rd graders in class ever again. They treat graduation like a funeral here- I didn't see a single kid happy to be leaving middle school. They talked about their highschool entrance exams with a kind of resignation- those that passed tried to keep it to themselves, those that failed were SHATTERED. I got a lot of "don't forget me" comments, and a few students, on my last day, walked up and said in unison "I want to don't say goodbye!"

I didn't have the heart to correct 'em.

Got a letter yesterday from one of the students at that school, routed through interschool mail, as I'm now at my next school. It reads:

"Dear Mr. Andrew Moll,

Thanks to your help, I like English. I'll never forget you. I hope you are well,

Sincerely Yours,

Shimada Yuko."

Stuck to the letter was a vending-machine photograph- which is lucky, as I had no idea who Shimada Yuko was. Turns out it's a girl in one of the 3rd grade classes who I honestly can't recall having talked to, or even really called upon in class. One of the quiet kids. I'm confused and touched all at once.

As most everyone is finished with the book, lessons as of late have been "Andrew-Sensei's Crazy Games"- so work is fun. Those of you thinking you'd like to teach English in Japan: BUY GAMES BOOKS. Start reading them now. Test a few, get a list ready. As the curriculum is mandated from upon high by the Ministry of Education, your flexibility is measured entirely in ten-minute games that you can sneak in at the beginnings and ends of classes.

Outside of work, life in Japan continues to be an adventure. Snapshot:

I was wandering Kyoto the other day with Veronica, and we stumbled across a cafe hidden underneath an art gallery, around the corner from the Teramachi shopping/temple district. It's down a precarious set of stairs papered in neon fliers from every musical act that has come, is coming or will come to the Kansai area, and the entire deal appears to have been excised from the active resistance zone of an Eastern European post-Soviet republic. Every surface is weathered and pitted, the door leading in hangs (calculatedly) just shy of true, and the heavily leaded glass filters all varieties of incoming light to "hazy dusk". You sit at large wooden tables on benches bolted to the concrete walls, and the layers of chipping paint give way to dimples and scratches that the proprietors seem to have no intention of fixing. It's pretentious, it's a little loud, it's a magnet for art students, and I absolutely love it. The level of care and craftsmanship that it took to make this place look neglected and abandoned is beautiful, seamless, and incredibly Japanese. The name?

Cafe Independants.
pax

I You Valentine Day Gift ! What do you like chocolates?

2006-02-14T18:41:00.000-05:00

In which we discover that my students are charming.

I need to work a bit harder at teaching them English, though. The title of this post was uttered unto me by a timid kid who never speaks in my class, as she brandished a bag of homemade chocolates in front of her as an exorcist brandishes a cross. Valentine's Day in Japan is a bit different.

Here, girls are obligated to give boys chocolates- not just boys they like, or boys they're interested in. Nigh unto every male they know receives a bag or box. The female teachers in my desk-block pooled their money and bought all the guys chocolates. The vice-principal handed out boxes. The girl students each brought to school a voluminous sack, and from it produced box after box after box- almost every boy in their class, all their male teachers; every Y chromosome among us left school carrying our own body weight in chocolate.

I was not excluded from this ritual. My desk accrued candy on it's own- I'd leave for class and return to find a gold box sitting there with an incomprehensible note ("Valentine Chocolate Give You!") and ALL the girls spent yesterday in giggling fits. There are three kinds of chocolate on Valentine's Day in Japan- tomochoco ("friend chocolate"), girichoco ("Obligatory Chocolate", for your superiors) and honchoco ("Real Chocolate", for those you are unafraid to use the L-Word with), and each one has a different subclass of sweets dedicated to it. Tomochoco's realm is that of the brownie and the chocolate pastry- handmade or storebought, your friends won't care. Girichoco is usually well-wrapped foreign chocolate- they like anything with French or Italian on the wrapper. Honchoco had damn well better be handcrafted, home-made chocolate showing an excruciating attention to detail, and if it's got no love letter, it's a pale imitation.

In this flurry of feminine giving, there is a catch. On March 14th, one month later, men are required (all male chocolate is pretty much girichoco, as I see it) to make a return gift OF DOUBLE VALUE OF THE ORIGINAL GIFT on "White Day". These return gifts are also subject to qualifications.

Should the male wish to win the heart of his paramour, the creme de la creme of White Day Gifts is the gift of cookies. Yeah. Girls have to buy exotic and expensive ingredients, guys have to break out the Pilsbury. On the other hand, ponder, if you will, how many cookies these poor guys are going to have to make to reach the double value requirement.

The second class of White Day Gifts, indicating close friendship or high respect, is the gift of white chocolate or of sweet pastry. It's no cookie, but it's nice.

The lowest class of White Day Gift is the humble marshmallow, indicating nothing but a fulfillment of your societal duty. You could be a jerk and give nothing, but the marshmallows are safer, and no doubt cheaper in the long run.

All of this knowledge comes to me in the form of student response to my incredulous queries- "You mean your boyfriends never give you chocolates on Valentine's Day? No flowers? No jewelry? You! Ryoichi! You have NO IDEA how lucky you have it! Ii Naa!" and as such surprises me as much as it probably surprises you. For my part, I exerted some Western Cultural Pressure and passed out little chocolates to all the girls I know- I am, after all, here to teach my culture.

Now: QUESTION TIME! My "Valentine's Day You Gift" is to answer a few of the questions that I've more or less let slide for awhile- sorry, guys- I should be keeping on top of this.

How do you wash chopsticks? Is it by hand, or do they have dishwasher inserts? -Galby
I don't have a dishwasher- I wash them all by hand. I can assure you it takes less than three seconds to make a chopstick immaculate- they have no curves, angles, bends or nooks in which dirt can hide. If you're REALLY all up on washing them in your dishwasher, here's my recommendation: Go to the hardware store. Buy some aluminum mesh- the aluminum won't rust like steel would. Cut it to fit the bottom of one of your silverware tray compartments. Water will flow through, but chopsticks won't. Caveat (and I only say this because Galby, our fair questioner, is a man after my own heart- he wouldn't think to do this any more than I would): run the dishwasher a few times with nothing in it to get any treatment they've got off the metal.

So you're saying the rigid social structure in the workplace breaks down at after-work activities? - Rusty
Absolutely. The Japanese believe strongly (and I can make this generalization because they really do) in separating work and play into compartments which never, ever touch each other. If you and your boss get together after work and go out for drinks, neither one of you "remembers" the other's unprofessional behavior in the morning. So do whatever you want. Make a pass at the waitress. Sing bad karaoke. Go to a public bath and stand before him as G-d made you. You will both pretend it never happened until you leave work again- it's like everyone here lives as two people. The young folks don't stick to the rule quite as much- when in the company of other young people, they will joke around at work- but around the bosses and with any outsiders, they are a unified block of people whose sole purpose is their task.

Even though the two experiences are separate, the effects are visible- this kind of cathartic play serves as a counterbalance to the stress of work. The Japanese work extremely long hours and the concept of "overtime" is still pretty foreign to them. By letting all barriers fall after work, they get along better in the workplace- a shared, open secret of misbehaviour makes you want to have smooth interoffice relationships.

Is there anything you miss from home? -Rusty
I've kind of passed the Big Slump- the things I used to miss are so far away in terms of time and place that I really don't notice them. Japanese food now tastes normal- fish tastes like my memory of chicken, chicken like my memory of beef, and beef has become something I really don't WANT to eat all the time. Big, stocky, wholesome foods feel like too much, too chunky, too rough. I find myself craving white rice. I haven't had a Coke in months- it's too sweet, too sticky. Tea, coffee, lemon water and sports drinks. I can't smell Japan anymore- the sweet, sickly smell of fructose I talked about way earlier? It's probably still here, but I think it's soaked in.
There are still ways to catch western TV and movies- if I've got fifteen bucks to spare, I could go see last month's North American releases in the theaters. TV runs the BBC in a split-language format- there's an English button on my remote control (that I find myself neglecting).

My friends and family feel pretty far off, but this weekly(ish) report is a dialogue, of sorts, so I don't feel like I've left anything permanently behind. When I get homesick, I loiter online until I find someone to talk to (now that I'm bringing my computer to work, I'm seeing a few more green bubbles on the buddylist- you guys ARE 12-14 hours behind), and I'm honestly too busy (and too happy- every time I order dinner I get a rush of accomplishment- food kanji are HARD) to think much about what I'm missing.

I'm in a good place, and I hope everybody else is too.

Sparks out.

pax

Naked Time!

2006-02-13T20:46:00.000-05:00

Writing is therapeutic.

This past weekend was the annual Board of Education trip to the onsen- a hot spring resort/public bathhouse. Every person I know that I have to address in honorific, superformal "I am scum, but please listen to my humble request honored master... may I drink this tea you've brought me? I am content to let it sit there and grow cold rather than commit the rudeness of sullying your eyesight with my horrific table manners" style speech piled onto a bus early Saturday morning and headed north, to Fukui Prefecture. The bus trundled all the way up to the Sea of Japan, made a right, and kept going for a few hours before we actually got there- and from the moment we stepped onto the bus, cans of beer were handed around and consumed at an alarming (to my ethnocentric eyes... if you drink before 11:00am in Michigan, you're an alchoholic) rate. Bear in mind, these are the BOSSES. The big shots. They are the top players in the local educational/political game. Japan has never had Prohibition- there are no social impediments to drunkenness. It shows.

Shortly after leaving, my magic cellphone/camera/email client ran out of batteries and became a pretty blue paperweight- I am disappointed beyond belief that I have no pictures of the AMAZING shoreline of the Sea of Japan. Rock spires leap out of the water with a jaggedness and immediacy that suggests that just before you arrived, these things fell from the mountains that loom over the shoreline, and you're going to be a lucky man if you're not struck by the latest boulder to aspire to islandhood. These mini-islands are topped, inconceivably, by scrub trees and moss- despite the fact that their sheer sides reach no less than ten meters up from the waterline. It's amazing country up there- I've got to go back when it's warmer.

After a terrifying ride through tunnels, mountain passes and general geologic insanity, we arrived first at a little roadside restaurant (whose name escapes me) for a lunch break. The town where this restaurant sits is famous for it\'s bamboo- everything in the restaurant (and attached gift shop!) is made of the stuff. Bamboo cups are awesome- just cut a chunk out of the stalk and slap a bottom in there. It looks almost too easy.

Lunch at the Bamboo restaurant was tasty, but our ultimate destination was still about an hour away, up the coastline to Awarase City, and the Grandia Awarase Onsen. Awarase is a fairly small town- smaller than Ritto, from the looks of it- but in the middle of the town there's a giant thirteen-story hotel in which I spent the rest of Saturday and the morning of Sunday. We did not leave to eat. We did not leave to shop. And about half the time, we did not wear clothes.

When you arrive at one of these things, you are led to your room and pick up a cotton kimono (yukata) that you wear at all times in the non-bath area of the hotel. The moment I entered, one of the workers (a charming lady in her late fifties with a beautiful set of gold teeth that certainly served as a model for the gangsta-rap gold fronts) pressed a special "large size" yukata into my hands, explaining quickly in Japanese that it was the biggest they had. It wasn't too terribly small- just... um... short-sleeved- and the hem, which ideally brushes the tops of your ankles, would be described on a woman as "provocative". On my hairy legs, it was just plain small. The robes were color-coded: Blue for boys, red for girls.

The hotel was entirely traditionally-styled. We slept ten to a room, rolling out futons at night on the fresh-cut bamboo floor (the room still smelled of green bamboo- it was great), and our sleep space at night was converted into a lounge during the day by folding up the futons, stuffing them in closets, and setting out low tables and big fluffy cushions. The moment we all changed into our robes and got settled, it was time for a trip to the baths. The baths, like the clothes, are segregated into a men's section and a women's section- which is good, as you are expected to take your bath au naturale.

These things are like steamy, silent, naked churches. Nobody talks. Everyone shuffles around in the mist, murmuring in low voices and holding tiny hand towels in front of them to avoid complete embarassment. The process is as follows: First, you go sit in the sauna and sweat for twenty minutes. Then, you wash off all the dirt from the outside world, and go sit in the sulfrous waters of the hotspring. After you're done there, you rinse. The smell of brimstone never comes out- between that, and the constant cigarette smoke, by the end of the trip I smelled like a creature from the Pit.

The outdoor bath is, in character, the diametric opposite of the indoor bath. It is not steamy. It is in no way churchlike. This one was on the fifth floor of the hotel, on a balcony with a waist-high (by Japanese standards- adjust your mental pictures accordingly) glass wall dividing you from the elements and from onlookers. Clear glass- not frosted, not bubbled, not in any way diverting the onlookers below from your naked form. I recieved more than one enthusiastic wave from a ground-level passerby. Before this trip, I could count the number of people who have seen me in my unfettered glory on one hand- including family members and medical professionals. This is no longer the case, and I feel like I've lost something.

We had dinner after the first soak in the baths, everyone sitting around a large u-shaped arrangement of low tables in their cotton kimono, wolfing down fresh crab from the Sea of Japan and an array of raw fish. Like every party, the wine flowed freely. I took up a bottle of sake and toured the room with it, pouring cups for my betters, and as such, got to avoid the hordes of people looking to pour for me. It's like a little game we play here in Japan, where peer pressure is a positive social force.

After the impressive dinner (punctuated by speeches and speeches regarding the exploits of the two retirees who were the guests of honor, spiced with deep bows and empty cups) we retired, en masse, to the in-hotel Karaoke house. I was, of course, pressed to perform. Their English selection spanned the breadth of all musical genres, as long as you wanted to sing Tom Jones or Ray Charles. I'll spare you the ugly details, but suffice it to say that Ray is a whole lot more fun to sing.

After Karaoke, it was time for a quick trip to the Ramen shop (also in the building- they just charge your room for all of this). Just before ducking out of the karaoke bar, I was approached by three young gas station attendants from Fukui who demanded to know my country and area of origin, and proceeded to keep me up to date with the exploits of my hometown sports teams. Evidently, the Pistons are strong this year, and they have international popularity. Even in a tiny town on the Sea of Japan, they are pop culture gods. The American Olympic Soccer team looks good enough that one of the gas-stand guys tells me he's going to root for them against Japan. Kids these days- no sense of national pride.

After the ramen shop, back to the bath. It was largely the same. Over the course of the weekend, I lost two kilograms- I think I might be a bit dehydrated.

Then, finally, it was time for bed. In one of the rooms, the party continued until the wee hours, drinking and carousing like the secret to brewing beer had been lost to the ages, and these guys found the last case.

I, however, stumbled back to my futon to collapse. We slept side-by-side, nine people lined up on futons with one-foot walking spaces between them. Custom dictated we sleep while wearing the cotton kimono; as a result, the next morning I wandered the hotel a wrinkled mess.

After one more dip in the baths (so very relaxing, but the brimstone smell really gets to you after awhile), there was time for a quick breakfast and then back on the road. Culture Moment! They serve soft-boiled eggs at the onsen- calling them "Onsen Eggs"- I'm not sure whether or not they actually boil the eggs in the water or it just seems that way, as they do IN FACT smell like a hot spring. Mmmm... eggs that smell like rotten eggs....

The trip home was more astounding scenery, with two notable stops: One, the Sea of Japan Daffodil Museum (a two-tiered establishment built at the bottom and top of a huge cliff- access to the top half of the museum is via a dangerous, steep, snowy, slippery, adjective-laden set of steps), and a fishmarket in Fukui. Almost everyone on the bus went home with a crab in a box- and these crabs are about the size of a deep-dish pizza. They're huge. The fishmarket was a huge indoor bazaar, hawking every kind of seafood I know about and quite a few I don't- again, my camera's lack of battery is a hated coincidence.

So that's Fukui- fish, naked men, and sulfur.

Dancing With Myself

2006-02-07T03:18:00.000-05:00

Even in Japan, Billy Idol songs hold a kind of kitschy cultural cache.

Finally, a free moment. Being back at Hayama is great, but it's also six different kinds of ridiculous. Early last week, I was reunited with the teacher who (granted, this part's pretty cool) that every day, at the start of English class, the kids would benefit from singing along with popular music from the much-vaunted Western Hemisphere. Who would the vanguards be, for this bold initiative?

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Britney Spears, Stevie Wonder, and Rogers and Hammerstein. These kids are tapped into the pulse of the RIGHT NOW with an intensity that borders on obsessiveness. I'm waiting for Billy Idol to make an appearance- he's my canary in the mine, my sign that things have progressed beyond horribly wrong and into a realm from which no man may return.

That, and I wanna see a class of 36 Japanese kids singing White Wedding.

Other weird stuff that happened last week? A kid reached out as I was patrolling the aisles and rubbed my stomach. For no reason. He said- loosely translated- "HA! That feels cool." When I stepped back, he scrambled out of his seat to follow. It is at this point that I made a fatal mistake. I brushed his hands down and away from me, laughing to accentuate the silliness of it all.

He took hold of the opportunity that presented itself, and post-handful-of-crotch, returned to his seat with a proud grin. I looked to my team teacher for a bit of help on this one, as yelling "Hands off the merchandise!" unfortunately doesn't directly translate into Japanese- I tried, got nothing but confused looks- and you'll never believe what the teacher said.

She leaned over the student, smiling sweetly, and said "Ask first."

###############################################################

I couldn't have made that up if I had tried. After a week of this kind of comedy of errors (I have classroom stories for DAYS- most of them revolve around teaching the kids to play Charades, which is entirely foreign to them), I had the opportunity to go to Kyoto for Setsubun on Friday. It's a post-new-year's festival to drive out demons by throwing handfuls of soybeans at their heads. People dress in demon costumes, there's a lot of bean-related chaos. Unfortunately, the fusillade of beans occurred on Thursday- the night I went, with the Foreign Crew, was the Food Night. I'm not complaining. Festival stalls in this country sell all manner of crazy food- squid on a stick, sweet potato french fries, the everpopular takoyaki and okonomiyaki... and they sell it next to booths hawking Playstation games, gardening implements, power tools and giant knives- in case you came to the festival to, say, build a treehouse, stock it with video games, and defend it to the death. Oh, and if that wasn't enough, I present the piece de resistance.
Yeah. That there's a giant fish head. It's bigger than my head. Note how it is the same size as the girl's TORSO on the left.

The shrine complex itself was unimaginably beautiful- just after this picture, it started to snow- big, drafty flakes that covered everything.
Were I a smart man (no claims there) I would have taken more pictures- next time.

All of these shrines have the big coin-boxes into which you huck (it's a verb- to huck) money into, clap, pray, clap again and move on. It's like a giant offering plate- a Karma Bank, if you will. So first we got our pray on, next to an alcove where the temple maidens were dancing with katana and handing out blessings to various important-looking besuited people. Then, we came across the big row o' candles- light one for luck. Having already made a deposit in the karma bank, and knowing full well that we were likely angering ancestor spirits with our very presence, we pushed on through the crowd (hint: Japan was not manufactured with the claustrophobic in mind) and up to the second shrine, where they were serving hot tea brewed through soybeans and handfulls of roasted beans, all gratis. Seems you're supposed to eat 1 + your age in soybeans to ensure you have a good year. Twenty-four soybeans, eaten one-by-one, feels like a TON of them when you're finished. I pity some of the old ladies who were dutifully chugging down veritable mountains of the stuff. Side note- green tea brewed with soybeans tastes at first horrible- it's SALTY- but it grows on you really fast, and you'll come to regret that it's served but one day a year. At least, I did.

After the festival, we all bailed back to our respective homes to rest up before reassembling the Foreign Legion to explore Osaka. We hit the Osaka National Gallery of Art (five-second review: Mediocre impressionists on loan from the Pushkin, awesome contemporary stuff in Basement 1, cool building), had lunch at the Hail Hail Organic Cafe by Sol Vita (more names I CAN'T MAKE UP), and then went to the Osaka Human Rights Museum.

It's not really a feel-good experience, but it's a positive thing to have- it pulls very few punches, and addresses a lot of the civil rights issues that Japan has faced/is facing/will face. The centerpiece exhibitions feature the Ainu (Ainu:Japan :: Native Americans:America), the victims of industrial pollution (a HUGE problem here, especially during the 60's and 70's), gender issues, AIDS, hate crime of all sorts, and (the big one) the Buraku.

I think I've given the lowdown on these guys before- short version, leatherworkers, butchers and tanners are a stigmatized subcaste over here, as they are believed to be unclean. They handled the discussion very tactfully at the Osaka Human Rights Museum- an especially nice touch, in my mind, is that they've got animal hides in layered racks with a big sign inviting people to "Let's Touch Many Kinds of Leathers!" If everybody goes to the museum and partakes in the taboo, everybody's tainted. Good move, Osaka.

After that, in need of something happy to balance it out, we went and found 1. the Mac Store (oh, little iBook, I want you so) and 2. A Mexican Restaurant. Burritos. Are. Awesome.

On the way to "Hermanos", I caught a glimpse of this beauty- evidently, James Brown is into Korean food.I again stress my inability to make this stuff up.

The next day, after our long Osaka trip, we went snowboarding. It was fun- the snow was great. I have some cool pictures left over from a previous trip (to Mt. Hakodate) that I share at this time to support my hypothesis:

In this country, the pinnacle of slopes fashion is rooted securely in the 1980's.
The mist in these pictures was much cooler in person- click to blow 'em up, and you might catch what I mean- there's a thick fog covering Lake Biwa, and the distant mountains are poking out like islands- it's almost as impressive a sight as the day-glo ski gear.

pax.

Short Post before Work

2006-01-30T17:38:00.000-05:00

Today's my last day at Ritto Jr. High for the next few months. I'm heading over to school #2, Hayama- good kids, but Ritto is three steps off my back porch, and Hayama's half an hour out in the country (by bicycle, 'course). The kids at Hayama are great, but I'm not sure if they can match this:

Yesterday, in one of my 3rd-grade (9th, in America) classes, the girl who asked me to sing Amazing Grace way back when I got here came to me with an interesting question. It was in the middle of an exercise, and one of the worksheets had a picture of a ninja scaling a building (today's subject: Prepositions! The Ninja is on the wall!). She pointed to the picture, and asked, politely, "Andrew-sensei, how do you say Ninja in English?" As you all know, the English for Ninja is Ninja. I tell her so.

She was waiting for this, I can tell. The giant smile of a kid who's won one against the teaching staff erupts on her face.

"So the CIA and FBI... ninja?"

Not Much to Report

2006-01-25T05:04:00.000-05:00

Lots of planning is going on- there's some big stuff coming up that I'll allow to remain a mystery until I'm sure I can pull it off- but planning doesn't make for interesting reading. So, rather than a blow-by-blow of my boring weekend, have an anecdote from work today. Great taste, less filling.

My third-grade students are now less than a month away from their High School entrance exams- which means that the focus of all our lessons has shifted entirely towards preparing them. As such, the speaking tests have become daily events, and their homework has risen to ridiculous, unenviable levels. I've got moral issues saddling middle-schoolers with piles and piles of homework. Given my past performance in that department, handing out assignments and expecting them to get done is an exercise in grandiose hypocrisy. The prisoner is trying to run the jail.

That said, the preparation for these tests is not a laughing matter, and it certainly doesn't matter what I think about the philosophy of crushing students under metric tons of xerox copies. Not up to me. On top of all this work (but wait, there's more) today we held mock interviews.

The high school acceptance process is finely crafted cruelty. Not only do they have to take a test just to get in, each school has their own tests- and the tests all happen at the same time. You may take ONE. This is not your father's SAT. If you mess up the test, you have to wait a year as a ronin (the old word for masterless samurai) and retake it the next year- there are no "second choice schools". After the test, the aspiring student then has to survive a battery of interviews- and one of these interviews is held in English.

So, behind a comically small desk, I sat today and interviewed students as if I was a member of the review board. CHILDREN ENTERED MY ROOM CRYING. They're insanely afraid of even practicing for this. So I followed the script, and did what I could. Here's a from-memory pseudotranscript of one session. Names are changed to protect the innocent. Italics are in Japanese.

Child enters the room. "Excuse me."
Teacher: "Please, sit down."
Child: "Thank you."
Teacher: "May I have your name?"
Child: "Akiko Tanaka."
T: "And how old are you?"
C: "I'm 15."
T: "What middle school did you go to?"
C: "Ehhh? Ano... Pardon?"
T: "What Junior High School did you attend?"
C: "Ritto Junior High."
T: "Why do you want to study English?"
C: "Eto....ano... English is Fun!"
T: "..." (Directions were to wait, and make them say a bit more)
C: "I want to interpreter. I want to study... ryugakusei wa... study abroad."
T: "Good! Now, we're going to look at some pictures. Who is the boy playing guitar?"
C: "Mark."
T: "What are these people doing?" (Picture is of about fifty people cleaning up a river)
C: "They are volunteer."
T: "Have you ever been a volunteer?"
C: "EhhhHH!? Er... One more time?"
T: "Have you done an activity like this before?"
C: "Yes. I have."
T: "When?"
C: "I cleaned a river in elementary school."
T: "Very good! Thank you. We're finished."
C: "Thank you. Excuse me."

Child stands, goes to leave. Now is when we (myself and my wingman, who has been sitting silently next to me THE WHOLE TIME) take five minutes to offer a critique. The wingman TEARS INTO this kid, just goes nuts on her, picking apart just about everything she did. I had absolutely no material I could touch on that he hadn't, so I just extended a fist forward in the universal gesture of support. "You rocked. Calm down, have fun with it, and you'll do even better on the real thing." (All my students can conjugate "to rock". I am a proud man.) She smiled, tapped my fist with hers (I am as proud as a new father- I taught the fist-tap to one class of first-graders, and now it's all over school), and sent in the next victim. They all went about like this.

These poor kids.

To change topics just a touch, the following is an open letter to the American Beef Industry:

JAPAN IS LAUGHING AT YOU. Evidently, your guys sent our guys a cow spine, violating Japanese standards for prevention of Mad Cow. It's all over the news. There have been countless reports showing American officials bowing and scraping, emphasizing that their meat is safe. Bush even went so far as to say that if Japan wasn't going to open their ports, he'd have to be "more aggressive (long pause) in convincing them." (paraphrase). The anchors on the news show wasted NO TIME comparing this to Commodore Perry's Black Ships- the first time America decided to aggressively convince Japan to open trade. They still haven't forgotten. Black Ships are a byword for "terrifying foreign action", and is a sure way to swing public opinion against capitulating and accepting American beef. Nobody likes getting pushed around.

You also might like to know that placemats in Japanese Mcdonalds proudly proclaim that their beef hails from Australia. Even your own guys know what's good for business. I have no solutions- I'm just an English teacher- but I figured you guys ought to know how things are going over here. It ain't too well.

Now, American Baseball is WORLDS more popular than American cows. The Seattle Mariners just signed another Japanese guy. This news spot took ten minutes. Mad Cow took only five, and three and a half were the anchors suppressing smirks and saying "Black Ships again, eh?"

pax

I have a job. I forget that sometimes.

2006-01-16T05:12:00.000-05:00

It occurs to me that I've somewhat neglected discussion on that thing that occupies 9 hours of my life every day, and the blog's been missing out on some comedy gold as a result. As such, bear with me as I break from madcap adventures (which will be addressed later in this post, I promise) to give you...

WHAT I DID TODAY!

6:30 am: Punch alarm clock. Go back to bed.

7:00 am: Wake, shower, make breakfast. Today: 2 eggs sunny-side up, toast, coffee. (I must maintain my culture in the face of what is to come.)

8:00 am: Walk to work. Pull some water out of the communal hot-water-tap (every grade-level group of teachers in the Teacher's Office has their own hot water boiler at the end of the row- this is consistent among all my schools- these guys drink a LOT of tea) and have another cup of coffee.

8:15 am: Morning meeting. Listen to reports of suspicious people, arson, missing shoes, bicycle theft, and student activity- who's smoking in front of the 7-11, who's been spotted out late at the restaurants and bars when they really ought to be studying (Students + Bars = OK, but OK + Late = Bad), employee gossip and the like. The meetings are MCed by the Vice Principal while the principal himself presides to one side and oversees the action, occasionally adding a coment or a "Thank you for your kindness."

8:30 am: Homeroom. I sit in the teacher's office and stare at the walls. In the classrooms, they might be discovering the lost secrets of Atlantis. I would never be the wiser. Coffee #3.

9:00 am: Class Formally Begins. First hour, I run speaking tests with Mr. Banno, an altogether cool guy who teaches the 3rd-grade English class and is also the school's "Discipline Teacher"- which gains him a seat on the administrative row in the Teacher's Office! His English is frighteningly good, and he and I make geeky language jokes about Japanese dialects and English slang.

Speaking tests are conducted thusly: Students memorize a dialogue from the textbook starring the lovable and easy-to-pronounce Emi, Mark, Ken and Yumi. Today's Dialogue (not, as thought previously, the Videogame Debate- sorry, Em, that's next week): Mark Goes to the Doctor. It's five or so lines total, featuring Mark and, not surprisingly, a Doctor. Banno-sensei and I take up a position in the subarctic hallway (in Japan, the classrooms are heated, but the halls are not) and pairs come out and perform for us. The first round of these go easily.

In the textbook, they've got a "Toolbox" section with helpful extra pieces of English. Today, the kids learned to ask "What's the matter with you?"- sparking a nice quick explanation from Andrew-Sensei that we in America really don't say that unless our next line is "Are you stupid?" The textbook writers are well-meaning, but often out of touch. The kids learn to say "What's the matter?" instead.

9:45 am: First hour ends. Ten minute break. Tea.

9:55 am: Second hour, with Furui-sensei, a kind woman about 50ish (maybe) who stands about 4'8" in heels. The moment I get through the door, a cheery 3rd-grader walks up to me, sticks out his hand, and says "Hi, Motherf*****!" with the biggest, most innocent smile in the world. He's a big American movie buff. Every day, he's got another curse to turn the air blue, and when I explain (DELICATELY!) why it's wrong to say, he laughs and waves as he returns to his seat. "Donmai! Donmai!"... the Japanese way of saying "Never Mind"- how never mind goes from Never Mind to Don't Mind to Donmai is a mystery to me. All my kids, courtesy of Japanese language-acquisition, butcher "Don't Mind"- that, "Sankyuu!" and "Bai-Bai" have been full-on adopted to the point that most of them don't know they're speaking English when they say it.

Later during class, we're administering the Speaking Test when a girl comes up, gives a fairly good performance and recieves a fairly good score. She sees the paper, and looks as flustered as any human being can be. She protests in Japanese for a few seconds, turns to her friend and quickly conferences, and then turns back to me and Furui-Sensei. In careful English laced with exasperation, she exclaims: "I... was... PERFECT!"

10:40 am: 10 minute break. I keep laughing about "Perfect", have another cup of tea.

10:50 am: 3rd Hour. Again, with Furui-Sensei. At the beginning of class, there's a group of boys in the back who won't sit down- about eight of them just cluster at the back, trying to hide what's going on in the middle of their little circle. The Mighty Gaijin goes to investigate. Two boys are crouched on the floor, doing their best imitation of Sumo wrestlers. They stomp, they bow, they rush each other and one tosses the other against the classroom door. He claps, smiles, and squats to mime recieving a drink in an impossibly tiny cup from one of the boys in the circle. The victor then looks up at me, and says:

"Ohh!! Andoryu-sensei! sumo shiteiru? ie, ie. Do... you... know... Japanese Sumo?"

"Of course, but it's English class now. Not sumo class."

"Ano sa, yattemiyou?"

With only that warning, the kid stomps once and hurls himself at me. He is the world's tiniest sumo wrestler. He's not a fat kid, nor is he particularly strong, and he keeps trying to toss me around as I lead him back to his seat and indicate to my combatant that now might be a good time to sit down.

11:35 am: 10 minute break. We now laugh about Hi Mofo, Perfect, and Littlest Sumo.

11:45 am: 4th Hour. Banno-sensei, more speaking tests, and an ultimately uneventful hour (aside from the theatrics that some of these kids put into their dialogues- "I think I have a medicine! Err... Headicine! Medicache! HEADACHE!") which passes fairly quickly, given that we're still sitting in the hallway slowly freezing.

12:30 pm: LUNCH! Today was a bento day- for three dollars, we get a box of cooked white rice, a packet of miso soup (to be mixed with hot water and drank from your coffee cup), and a box of assorted small portions of things that are alternatively delicious and terrifying. Some pickled stuff, some tempura, a dollop of thin noodles covered in sauce that looks and smells like axle grease. It's still better than the normal school lunches, which can be unassumingly normal (bread, soup, potatoes, meat) or terrifyingly Japanese (whole fish about the size of sardines, to be eaten whole- head, bones, digestive tract all intact- in one of two varieties: plain, or stuffed so full of fish eggs that their little bodies are bursting) - and no matter how crazy it is, I eat it out of a certain sense of cultural ambassadorship. The little fishies are actually starting to taste a whole lot better than they did when I first got here- my tastebuds have decided to walk off the job.

1:00 pm: Cleaning Time. I sweep the teacher's room with the Vice Principal.

1:15 pm: Fifth Hour. Class with Nambu-sensei and the 2nd graders (in America, 8th grade). This class is calm, compared to Sumo Sumo Mayhem, but they like to ask questions. Today, they wanted to know if I: a) Bleached my hair (no) , b) Wear color contacts (no), c) Have a girlfriend (no!) d) want to date *this student* (NO!!!!!!). This is the same class, last week, that I walked up behind a pair of students chatting and generally ignoring Nambu-sensei, and they nearly fell out of their chairs in shock and fear, exclaiming loudly in Japanese that I was like a "Kaiju." What's a Kaiju? A giant monster. Like Godzilla- Gojira around these parts.

2:00 pm: Sixth Hour. I didn't have to teach this hour today- so Andoryujira prepped for tomorrow and messed around with the email on the cellphone.

After a whole lot more sitting around, preptime, and chatting with students and teachers, I went home at 5:00, opened up the laptop, and tapped out this entry. That's today.

Now, we'll go back in time really quick and touch on what I did with my weekend.

Friday, I left school and hopped on the bike to entertain some curiosity. Turns out I have to ride one kilometer to leave all conceit of "city life" behind and find...

The Wastelands. The moment you get out of town, as if you've crossed a magic line of demarcation, tightly-packed buildings and tiny roads give way to unthinkably large expanses and the looming mountain range that stands sentinel between Lake Biwa and the city of Kyoto.

I present, also, a little quirky shrine I found in the middle of one of these fields:

And its strangely dizzying shrine lantern.

Just for contrast, later that night I found this crazy thing:

This shop sells nothing but implements with which to cook beef. Some things don't need my wordy self getting in the way of their natural beauty. That evening, dinner at a Nabe restaurant- the ever-popular everything-in-the-pot winter food- and I ended up having a delicious bowl of something that I couldn't identify- so I asked- and it turns out that I've committed an unpardonable sin.

I have eaten whale. In my defense, I didn't order it. But it was tasty- guilt is delicious, evidently.

Saturday was a wash- didn't do anything exploration-tastic or touristy. Just had a few friends over to cook risotto, as we were all having garlic withdrawal. The house is now safe from vampires.

Sunday, however, was a different story. The White Stripes were set to play at Zepp Osaka in Osaka's port district, and I, by hook or by crook, was going to go. The friends who were going to accompany me decided to either get sick or be lazy, so I alone rode the train in. I alone met a few really cool photography students, one of whom had just returned from a two-year study-abroad in Britain, and as such speaks the coolest English in the world (I don't know why, but people who speak a second language with a clearly identifiable accent are AWESOME in my book) and I alone strolled confidently up to the doors of Zepp Osaka to find...

That Jack White has lost his voice, and as such has postponed or perhaps cancelled the Japan tour.

Disappointing, but it did let me poke around the port island a bit before the sun went down. It was eerie- on Sunday evening, the majority of the island seemed deserted.
There was a flea market in a parking lot just to the left of the above picture, with a live band and a cover charge. I tried getting a picture of it, but none of the pictures quite captured the Mad-Max flavor of this tent city in the middle of a gravel parking lot surrounded by this concrete insanity...
There was a sign, however, that pointed to further items of interest...

The Osaka World Trade Center! Seems all Trade Center architecture shares the "Let's make this a SERIOUSLY big building" ethic.

The trade center's the one on the right. On the left is the NTT (Think AT&T, Japan-style) building.

This is the view from the harbor behind the Trade Center, at sunset...

After that, I got some dinner at the Christon Cafe- a church-themed bar/restaurant in Osaka. Gold, crosses, red velvet, a giant statue of Mary... It was sacrilicious. The interesting thing here is that they have no idea why what they're doing is subtly wrong- communion-wine vessels for salad dressing, disco balls over crucifixes.

Anyways, that was pretty much my weekend, and from now on I'll be giving better reports on what's going on at school. The little rockband that could, for the record, is still practicing every time the brass band meets- and they're getting better. They're still not going to open for the White Stripes, or anything...

but it looks like they've got some time to practice before the White Stripes come back.

pax

Boys, Be Ambitious!

2006-01-09T05:25:00.000-05:00

There's a bronze statue on a hill outside of Sapporo, Hokkaido of a Western man, his arm outstretched towards the city. On the base, the words "Boys, Be Ambitious" is inscribed in English. These words attacked me the moment I stepped off the plane at Chitose Airport, and haunted me the entire time I was in Hokkaido- appearing emblazoned on streetcars, on signs in the street, written on the backs of ski lifts and engraved on manhole covers. It wasn't until I returned to Shiga and fired up the internet that I found out what the story was. An American teacher spent nine months in Sapporo, and they gave him a statue and adopted his parting words as the city's mantra.

I've got some work to do if I want a statue- that guy's a tough act to follow.
Let's back up a bit, though.

I started my trip to Hokkaido at Osaka Itami Airport- I wrote a short cry for help from the coin-operated computer just before I left. There is one other item of particular note there at the airport:

It's a furniture store. It's a furniture store prior to the security checkpoint, no less. Should I decide that there's a lamp or, god forbid, a couch I simply can't live without, how exactly do I get it onto the plane and off to wherever I'm going? How do I smuggle a shoe rack past airport security?

That aside, I promised a picture of the PokePlane that I rode in on the way to Sapporo.

There it is, taxiing into the gate. Can't really see it too well- blame airport security. I also couldn't get any pictures of the interior- I have a cameraPHONE, and a live cellphone is verboten on the plane. I'd like to say that the inside was a brightly-colored pokewonderland, but that is sadly untrue. It was instead a normal plane, with pictures of Pikachu on the headrests.The flight attendants, when serving drinks, donned pokemon-themed aprons as well. Nobody thought twice about it. They even went around handing out Pokemon postcards everyone on the plane- and EVERYONE liked them. From the oldest grandparent passengers to the youngest children, absolutely every passenger exclamed "AWW CUTE!!" and took three or four.

A word on Japanese flight attendants: They are at once flight staff and the most exquisite marketing scheme I have ever seen. Their uniforms are designer-label clothes (yeah, even the neckscarf), and all of the Attendant Wear is for sale in the in-flight catalogue. Even their watches- which are all standard-issue. I got to talking to one (she used to be an English teacher- cool person, name's Runo, lives in Osaka, studied in Vermont for a year), and they're evidently not HAPPILY serving as mannequins for a manufactured jetset lifestyle, but it's part of the job- and "breaking character" to chat and kvetch with the gaijin would get her in a bundle of trouble, if the supervisor spoke enough English to understand us.

Anyway, after a very Pokemon flight to Sapporo (Air Nippon Airways-mon, I choose you!), I got off the plane at about 12:30, and caught a bus out to the Sapporo International Ski Area.
While on the bus, I was an idiot tourist and took a few pictures.

This picture is still within Sapporo city limits- we're not out into the mountains yet.

The snow in this country is amazing. There are buckets and buckets and buckets of it, and it's all light, fluffy powder. Snowboarding on this stuff is more like surfing than anything else- there's absolutely no resistance, no scraping or shudders. Sapporo Kokusai is the smallest of the four mountains I visited this vacation- and it is still large enough to be, at a glance, forbidding. There are gondolas and avalanche warnings. I loved it.

After the first day of snowboarding, the bus returned to the hotel (at night, on narrow mountain roads, in the middle of a blizzard- awesome), where I checked in and dropped my stuff off. My hotel room was literally an eight-foot cube- eight feet in every direction with an attached five-foot cube bathroom. TINY. I took pictures, but they didn't really turn out. Sorry.

What did turn out, however, is the view from my hotel window.
Whats that white thing in the middle of the picture? Could it be?

YES! It's another Statue of Liberty! I think Japan's got to have the highest capita Statue of Liberty count in the world. This one lifts her lamp beside the golden door of yet another love hotel. My hotel, the Tokyu Inn, was a pretty ritzy arrangement of eight-foot-cube rooms, but it happened to be located in Susukino, the huge entertainment district of Sapporo. Susukino is famous for its high number of bars, love hotels and "massage parlors" all packed into a one-kilometer square.

I managed to find, in this snowy sprawl of neon and drunken salarymen, a Singaporean restaurant. The staff here were all Japanese, but (from numerous trips to Singapore) spoke Singlish almost exclusively in the shop. Well, Singlish mixed with Japanese- it was, however you describe it, the coolest creole language I've ever heard/learnt to speak. I went back every night after snowboarding, had some really good Mee Goreng, and just soaked up the language.

Confession: I'm a linguistic sponge. I love talking (big surprise), and I love listening to the different ways people have to express themselves. It's a constant fascination. This shop's brand of Sinjapanglish is, in my opinion, the eventual destination in the evolution of English in Japan- they're just ahead of the curve. It's a free mixing of English structures, Japanese and Chinese vocabulary, and Chinese interjectory particles. It's a fun way to talk. I really, REALLY want to go to Singapore- just to have a chance to speak like that all the time.

But I digress.

The next day, I woke up and destroyed the hotel's breakfast buffet. There were two lines of food- one Western, one Eastern. I like to think of myself as an international kind of guy- so there was no choice in the matter but to eat both courses. A few times.

After going all Godzilla on the food (and discovering that eggs, sausage, rice and miso soup go pretty well together), I hopped on the first bus out to Rusutsu. Rusutsu's about two hours from Sapporo, and it's one of the three REALLY BIG ski resorts in Hokkaido. The snow (and the mountain) are awesome- I'll let the pictures speak for themselves, as nobody really wants to read a dissertation on the state of snowboarding in Northern Japan.

That last one- the one that's not a picture taken from the top of a snowy mountain? That's the resort's animatronic band, Daniell and the Dixie Diggers. They sang and bantered- all in English, no Japanese translations- and belted out such hits as "Sweet Georgia Brown" and "Dixie". Why a Southern ragtime band in Hokkaido, Japan?

I have no idea. We report, you decide. The locals love 'em, though. The benches in front of this bandstand were never empty, and when the animatronic animals kicked it into high gear I could hear people humming along. "To live and die in Dixie..."

Next to the bandstand (and you'll have to forgive the crappy picture, but this simply must be seen to be appreciated) was a vending machine that sold hot dinners.
Press one of the buttons, and a plate of spaghetti (or pizza, or whatever) drops into the little door at the bottom hot and ready to eat. We need more of these- everywhere.

That evening, back to the Singaporean restaurant. They're good people, it's inexpensive, and they asked me to come back- seems they're all pretty keen on having someone around that understands (and laughs) when they make rude comments about the customers in Singlish. If any of you out there go to Sapporo, I highly reccomend this place- it's called "Kopitiam". Tell 'em Andy sent you.

The next day (after another huuuge breakfast), I went to the A Number-One Best Ski Area in Japan- Niseko. It's three peaks, five ski zones, and waaay more places than I could explore over the course of one day. It was the first time that the trail map wasn't just a nice thing to have, but a necessary survival tool- "Now, if I take this run over to this lift, I'll have to take these runs to get back in time for the bus back to the hotel..." The powder was so deep that at one point I sank in to my armpits and had to literally climb back out sans snowboard. This wasn't in the backcountry- this was WELL WITHIN the marked trails... it's just that big, that even within the groomed area there are pristine, untouched fields of snow. Posted in all the gondolas were forbidding warnings that areas marked off by red ropes (two large sections inbetween the three peaks) were currently undergoing "snow stability testing" with explosives, and that anybody going in there was either going to end up dead or arrested. Yikes. On the upside, the trails that were open still had runs up to five and a half kilometers long. Five and a half kilometers takes a REALLY LONG TIME to snowboard down, for those of you wondering. And if that isn't enough, there are "Backcountry Entrance Zones" where you can ski off-piste without incurring the wrath of the ski patrol, for those of you who come prepared with avalanche beacons, shovels, and snowshoes... mind you, without the wrath, you also sacrifice the protection of the ski patrol. Forget that. There are WAY better ways to die than that. Warm ways. Ways in Bermuda.

So I avoided the ropes and stayed in the marked areas, but still got some pretty nice pictures. The first half of the day was a blizzard- great for riding in, as the snow's always fresh, but horrible for pictures, as the visibility's about ten feet- so I've only got these few to show off.

I think the last one's my favorite.

That night, back to the Singaporean restaurant (again! What can I say, they're nice guys- and I got back from Niseko at 11:00... way too late to explore the city), and after an evening of chatting with the staff and customers the owner calls me over. He messes around behind the bar for a second and emerges with a Kopitiam staff T-Shirt- which he insists I take back to Shiga, and wear, so as to entice all my friends to come to Hokkaido. Like I said, they're great guys.

The last morning of the trip, I descend upon the buffet like a pack of ravenous crows for the third and final time. Then, it's back on the bus (I spent a lot of time on that bus!) to go to Sapporo Teine Ski Resort. It's not huge like Rusutsu or Niseko, but it's a lot of fun- it's a very family-oriented resort. They've got a mascot, who wanders around mugging for photos.

They've also got a theme park that is only accessible by ski lift. There are signs on the backs of the lift chairs like "Enjoy Go-Carts!" and "Happy Together Family Time!"

Unfortunately, they weren't running the coaster in THE BLIZZARD, nor was the Ferris wheel going. I'm a sucker for Ferris wheels.

After a day of wholly enjoyable snowboarding, my sore carcass clambered on the bus, transferred to a train, and got to the airport two hours before my flight left. So I decided to grab dinner at the airport cafeteria. You order your food in the line, and you get a box about the size of a paperback book with a flashing light at one end- and then you're told to go sit down. Every table has one of these.
So you place your "waiting-box within this sheet limit"- and the microchip under the sheet tells the waiting-box which table you're at. The waiting-box transmits that signal to the register, and the waiter brings you your food- always the right food, always the right place. I'm amazed- it's a great idea. Now all they need is to figure out the English language- I mean, come on. "The visitor of reciept"?!

My plane back to Osaka was ANOTHER POKEJET- this one even cooler than the first.

They were so proud of it that they had a model on display in the airport lobby.

Color me impressed. It, too, had the Pikachu headrests and the stewardesses in Pokemon aprons. There's something really charming about the unabashed way that they embrace "cute" in this country. On a completely different track, our "inflight movie" was a live broadcast of the sumo championships. Nothing funnier than watching the big guy next to me- who the whole time watched the sumo absolutely intently- erupt into an exclamation of "CUTE!!!!" when the flight attendant came by with the tray of Pokemon postcards.

Plane ride, bus ride, train ride later, and here I am in Shiga again. Upon reflection, the best part of Hokkaido was the fact that they have central heating up there- central heating, and insulation. The cold isn't so bad when you can look forward to a nice warm house. Here in Shiga, it's cold ALL THE TIME.

No time for worries about that, however. I have a plan for the next adventure... I must find the Koka Ninja Village.

Somewhere in the town of Koka, there is an old ninja training ground. It is, supposedly, absolutely awesome. Koka is on my local train line. It's practically in my backyard. The fact that there is a ninja village here, and that the ninja village's whereabouts have escaped me for this long...

I would be shaming my family and ancestors if I didn't find these ninja. (note: the plural of ninja? Ninja. Why? I don't know. It's like moose. Maybe that way you never know how many ninja there are- one ninja? Eighteen ninja?) But before that, it's back to work- opening ceremonies is tomorrow, and as I understand it I do still have a job. Can't all be snowboarding and ninja.

Wish it could, though...

pax

EDIT: I don't think the original post quite emphasized how cool it was up there in the mountains- there were times, when it was just me, the snow, and the suicidal dropoffs, and it felt like I was the only human being in the world. It was like a cold, silent and solitary heaven- to delve into pop culture, I was a trespasser in the Superman's Fortress of Solitude- and as my fellow suburbanites can attest, when you grow up surrounded by the constant roar of the freeways, silence and open space like that are nigh unto holy.

Let's Enjoy Internet by 100-yen coin!

2006-01-04T18:06:00.000-05:00

No, honestly, that's what the scrolling text at the top of my screen says AT THIS VERY MOMENT. This missive is coming to you courtesy of the coin-operated '@station'- yes, a coin-operated computer- next to the Starbucks in Osaka Itami Airport. Osaka Itami looks exactly like every other airport I've seen- a large, neutral-white waiting area filled with expensive restaurants serving cheap food. This isn't, unfortunately, the airport built on an artificial island- that one's about a half-hour to my south.

The giant bright spot in all of this is that I was, by pure chance, lucky enough to score a seat on the PokePlane. The jet I'm about to board is painted- every inch- in bright, happy Pokemon characters... my ADD is screaming for mercy.

Gotta go- I promise, there will be pictures of the Pokeplane. Call it a promise.

Chapter 78: In which strange things are consumed incidentally, mundane things accidentally, and a bell is rung occasionally

2006-01-01T04:48:00.000-05:00

To begin, Happy New Year, everybody. Welcome to that three-to-five month floatspace in which we all still write 2005 on the checks. This has been a madcap Winter Break- the details of which I shall elucidate below. First, though, a warning: Should the reader still maintain a delusion that I am anything shy of a complete idiot, you'd do well to disabuse yourself of that notion forthwith. It'll prepare you for what's to come.

With that out of the way... This past Christmas Day, I decided to go into the mountains in pursuit of a stereotypically White Christmas- and found it, in abundance. The day was spent up in North Shiga, snowboarding in the mountains. No bones were broken. We shall try again, next week (starting the 5th) ... here. Niseko Resort, Hokkaido.

That, however, is in the future. To pick up where I left off, the day after Christmas I hopped in a car with the owner of my local ramen shop- who is, in fact, a great guy. Momentary tangent: This man, on Christmas Eve, cooked me roast chicken and mashed potatoes. He is, for that alone, a king among Ramen Guys. It also helps that he speaks fluent English.

So he, and the rest of his ramen shop staff, decided to take a field trip to Kobe, which is evidently the Japanese ancestral birthplace of ramen. It's about two hours by car from where I'm at in Ritto, to the south past Osaka. We left at about 9:30, and made a beeline for Kobe's famous Chinatown.
What, pray tell, do you think we ate (in a city famous for it's delicious beef)?

Yeah. Ramen. Don't get me wrong- it was great ramen, and certainly didn't set us back a few hundred USD like the beef would have- but I was shocked. After we poked around the Chinatown a bit (and the Ramen Shop guy, visible as the bald man in the foreground of the picture above, shocked us all by speaking fluent Chinese in addition to his English and Japanese- this guy needs to get out of the ramen business), we decided to head for the Harbor.

On the way, we passed this cool little slice of cultural juxtaposition.
Don't know why, but this just struck me as cool-looking. Same goes for the harbor.

The temptation to commandeer a seaworthy vessel and set out for the open blue was strong, but any piratical tendencies swelling in my breast were squelched by a simple reminder from the ramen crew that they were going to go have some cake at a little restaurant by the harbor, and that a mad dash for the high seas would pretty much destroy my chances of coming along. So I put that fantasy on the backshelf, had some cake, and went home happy.

The next day was our Board of Education Bonenkai- the "forget-the-year party". This was, without question, one of the strangest experiences I've had yet in this country- and that's saying a lot. The Board met at City Hall at five-forty in the evening, and piled into a bus that carried us all of three blocks to the restaurant where the party was to be held. Just a dinner party. Not too crazy. We (about thirty people, including the Superintendent and various educational luminaries) were shown to a special room in the back of the restaurant about the size of a classroom, and seated on the floor around a series of low tables, each with a burner in the center. Having seen this sort of configuration before, I didn't really think about it. I figured we were just going to have nabe- the communally-cooked, everything-in-the-pot soup that's a winter staple around here and the preferred chow of sumo wrestlers everywhere.

Except that the dish for the party was turtle soup. By soup I mean an entire turtle, bones and all, in a pot. The shell figured largely in this design- the poor creature was cooked inside himself. They spared not a single organ in this meal- everything (save for vegetables, spices, and the everpresent side dish of rice) came from the turtle, and everything that issued forth from the beast was, at some point, consumed. Everything.

We started the night (and this should have sent out warning flags, really) with the traditional toast- except each guest was given a shot glass full of something bright red, and smelling of iron and alchohol. I had a feeling I knew what was going on, but just in case I nudged my coordinator, sitting next to me. "What is this?" She smiled, shrugged, and said simply: "Chi."

Blood. Turtle blood, in fact, mixed with sake. I wasn't going to be able to get out of this without a lengthy apology and a great deal of shame dealt to my family and ancestors, so down it went.

I can now say, safely, that blood and ricewine tastes almost exactly as you'd expect it to taste. A bit like rusty well water, and a whole lot like a thousand cultural alarms going off at once in your brain telling you that drinking blood belongs only in the realm of classic horror films. It didn't really taste that bad, but I can say I feel just a touch unclean.

After the turtle was summarily consumed, and everyone had seemingly drank their fill (some of these older Board of Ed members can really pack it away!), the ritual of exchanging sake cups began. Evidently, this is just a Shiga prefecture thing- people in other parts of Japan don't do this- so to impress your friends with your knowledge of obscure cultural folkways:

First, drain whatever's in your sake cup, and hand it to your intended victim. The victim rotates the cup (so that they're not drinking off the same spot you did) and holds the cup feebly, knowing full well what's about to happen. Then, you fill their (your) glass, and sit smiling at them until they drink it and return your cup to you- at which point you are required to drink again. Repeat ad libitum.

Shortly after the flurry of cup-passing, at roughly eight-thirty, the party came to a formal conclusion. There was another speech, more clapping, and more bowing- and then the second party started.

This is how formal company parties occur in Japan. First there is the dinner party, and then there are "floating parties"- groups of people who decide the party isn't over, so they decide it's time for karaoke. I had the good fortune (?) of being included in this "floating world", and being ferried away in a taxi (one excellent thing I can say is that they take the utmost precaution against DUI) with six or so of my coworkers to a "snack shop"- the grown-up version of a karaoke bar.

Karaoke bars are mostly little, dimly-lit rooms where your party can sit and sing uninterrupted, your only companion an occasional waitress. When a karaoke bar is no longer seedy enough for your veteran tastes, you graduate to a snack shop. A snack shop is a karaoke bar where everyone sits together in a velvet-coated room (walls, ceiling, sofas- the floor alone escapes the velvet treatment, and it's shag carpet)- about twenty of us now- and is constantly attended by Mama- an aging, kindly, matronly woman in a maroon satin pantsuit.

I could not make this up if I tried.

We were there until midnight. There is nothing more amusing than seeing your sixty-year-old Board of Education Director croon out a lovesong in front of all his comrades- and every single one of them (us) hung on his every word. All laughter, no matter how scraping and gravelly the voice, no matter whether the singer could carry a tune or if they dragged it along like a child to the dentist, and always, ALWAYS supportive. Not a soul cracked a joke at the expense of a poor musician.

The next day, everyone was back at work as usual... well, everybody but me. I went to see Mr. and Mrs. Smith with a friend (HILARIOUS IN JAPANESE- probably not so much in English) and bummed around the house.

The next day: Osaka or Bust. There wasn't much of anything going on, so I decided to go get lost in my favorite city by the sea. I was largely successful. In the course of getting lost, I found this oddity.

What could it be?

This vertical park has a path that winds up eight floors of terraces, and under (in?) the park is a shopping mall. At the top is a bandshell, and a wonderful open-air view of the city.Later that night, I went down to Shinsaibashi to explore the crazy neon shopping district.
It goes on like this for miles and miles- people, shoulder-to-shoulder (or, in my case, elbow-to-ear) without a break. Osaka does not know solitude. What it does know, however, is how to surprise me. I ducked into a stairwell alongside this road, and dropped down into an underground city.

Under a great deal of Osaka is an interconnected labyrinth of tunnels, subway stations, and shopping districts. You can walk, underground and without surfacing, for quite a ways- so much so that you can track changes in architecture from one hub plaza to another.
This one, for example, has a fountain- and a bunch of little kids more than happy to play in the spouts. I'm intrigued by the possibility of exploring Osaka Below- next time I'm in the area, that's a mission.

Parting thoughts for the city: Osaka has, without fail, the most interesting collection of McDonald's stores I've ever seen.Note the naugahyde.

After an ultramodern day in Osaka, it was time for New Year's Eve in Kyoto. I left the house at about 2:00, with the intention of scoping out good temples to visit. On the train, I ran into a young couple from Texas in the area for the holidays, and got to play tourguide for awhile. It really is a good deal of fun showing people all these little places I've discovered, or had shown to me- and I figure it's a good way to build up interesting-place karma. If I share with them, someone else will share with me, eventually.

New Year's Eve in Japan is very much a religious holiday. There is, in Kyoto, no giant ball and no Dick Clark to ring in the new year- rather, they have bells. Lots and lots of temple bells, and starting at 12:00 midnight each temple bell is rung 108 times, to purify the body of the 108 worldly sins. The temples themselves are lit up and look like, as an Australian who I met in the subway mentioned as we stared up at this gate, things out of a fairy garden.

The mood of the city is halfway between a religious service and a carnival. There are food booths out on the street, all the temples are open, the streets are littered with monks and women in kimono. It's absolutely surreal. At each temple, I burned a stick of incense for my family, for my friends, for everyone I know who was at that very moment walking in the sunlight as I stood in the dark before large iron cauldrons, surrounded by the tolling of the bells. If you are reading this, a stick was burnt for you- best wishes for the new year. Trust me, it happened- there were a lot of temples, and a lot of incense. I ended up burning a few sticks for "anybody I forgot- ow, my fingers, that was hot- this one's for you." by the time I got around to the end of the long stretch of temples and minor altars at the end of the district. At one of the temples, I recieved a pair of cakes of what appeared to be very hard, solid mochi- rice pudding cakes- and when I broke one up and shared it with the Australian and a guy from Baltimore, we all took big bites and immediately were struck with the realization that it was, in fact, wax.

I told you I was an idiot. This wax mochi is supposed to be taken home, and put in your tokonoma- your decorative altar/nook at your house. Most definitely not meant to be eaten.

It takes, for those of you interested, a very, very long time for the temple bells to toll 108 times. Hours, in fact. At some of the temples, the monks toll them alone- behind closed gates. At some, the public steps up and rings them- lines of people winding along gravel paths and around firepits, waiting to take their place for a moment at the giant swinging hammers that strike the bells. There were, at these temples, monks standing behind large casks of amazake, sake with bits of sweet mochi (this time, real) stirred in, handing out cups for free with their blessings. It was respectful, and joyful, and a little sad. Everyone- all the clumps of people I passed- was smiling and talking softly- no loud voices, and no rushing. We moved in slow, measured steps, as if dreaming, and every time one of the huge temple bells tolled I could feel the sound rumbling through me, shaking the tips of my ribs and walking up the backs of my fingers.

pax

Happy New Year.

A very Buddhist Christmas

2005-12-23T03:28:00.000-05:00

No animals were harmed in the writing of this post.

Yesterday was Closing Ceremonies, marking the end of school during the year 2005, the year of the Rooster. The Japanese, in their typical "let's borrow a few pieces o' culture, mix 'em up, see what comes out" fashion, follow the Chinese zodiac, our Gregorian calendar, and the Japanese "nengo" Era Calendar- which means as I write this, it's the year of the Wooden Rooster, 2005, and the 17th year of the reign of Emperor Heisei. I myself was born in the 57th year of the reign of Emperor Showa (written: Showa 57)- for a kick, find out more about the nengo year system- so you can confuse people who ask you when you were born!

Anyhoo, so we had Closing Ceremonies yesterday. Before the "festivities" began, we once again marshalled the students and sent them on a cleaning binge. The teachers, of course, pitched in as well, which is how I found myself with a mop, a bucket, and a class of confused-looking first-graders at the bottom of a stairwell when the power went out.

Why'd the power go out? Because this year, the gods of winter have decided to visit their wrath upon Ritto with great and stormy vengeance, seeking a retribution beyond the ken of man. Which is my Lovecraftian way of saying: "Snow." Snow knocked out the power. They got it fixed in half an hour, while the students kept cleaning- no reason to stop, after all- and then it was time for the show....

The show was essentially was the same as Opening Ceremonies in August- with one important difference. There is no central heating in Japanese schools. So when all the students dutifully filed into the gym and sat on the floor in rows by class, their frozen breath rose in little puffs and wisped away towards the ceiling- from behind, where I stood with the other teachers, their identical black uniforms made them look like rows and rows of little factory chimneys, puffing away. The speeches were long, forgettable, and entirely in Japanese, filled with admonitions on the dangers of smoking, the importance of doing your homework, that sort of thing. We had one more class after the assembly finished, and it was my job to help one of my teachers keep an eye on a classful of kids who were simultaneously frozen solid (from the icebox treatment in the gym) and eager to get the heck out of there. He decided that now would be the perfect time for bookwork. HA. 'course, my arguments that they won't want to pay attention fell on deaf ears, so as he patrolled, ensuring kids were working in their workbooks, I decided it was time for a little culture lesson.

I grabbed a pair of slacking boys in the back who had already put away their workbooks, grabbed a piece of looseleaf, and taught 'em paper football. Pretty soon, the whole class (teacher included) had games going at their desks- it spread like wildfire. Best part? It was good English practice- I explained the game to the first pair (IN ENGLISH) and made them teach the next two who wanted to play, and so on. Seems that they didn't have this one before.

After the culture lesson, school let out for winter break. We were scheduled to have a "bonenkai", or "forget-the-year party" with the teachers, but the snow was heavy enough to stop the trains for awhile. It got cancelled. Fine with me- I went to another live jazz night with my college-bum friends (whose conversations are making more and more sense, thank God), got called a Gaijin a couple of times, and called it a night. Pretty normal.

This morning, I awoke to find that my water had frozen in the pipes. Had to wait for sunup to thaw 'em out so I could take a shower. Somebody send me a roll of Pink Panther Insulation- I think it's time for another Culture Lesson.

After a brisk (WHOO!) morning shower, I discovered an innocuous message on my cell phone from one of my native friends- something about a lunch party. Those who know me know I would never turn down lunch or a party individually- together, they are irresistible.

I meet her and her friends a couple of stops down the main trainline, and we all pile in a car and take off to Destination Unknown. In retrospect, this kind of lifestyle could get me abducted by the Yakuza one day... "Want lunch? Here, hop in this car with a bunch of people you don't know!" Destination Unknown turns out to be a clean, modern Buddhist temple.

A Buddhist Temple in which they are throwing a Christmas Party. Ladies and Gentlemen, I have found the Buddhist version of the Unitarian Church. It was all very pleasant and cross-culture festive- their big wooden Buddha out front was decked out in Santa gear, we had a veritable feast of vegetarian delight (remember, eating meat and killing animals is a Buddha No-No. I remembered this AS WE WALKED IN and took off our coats... one foreigner-sized leather biker jacket among a sea of cotton blends) and after the meal there was a short service.

I'm not much the religious type, but this next part was pretty cool. Before the service, my friend asked me if I wanted to recieve a Buddhist blessing. Blessings are like lunch and parties- I'm an easy mark for karma. She had me write, clearly, my name on a form (why? Huh? Eh, just go with it) and fill out some quick info- age, birthdate, place I live, all that. This happens so often in this country that I've stopped asking questions a long time ago. She writes her name at the top of the slip, and carries it off to the priestess. About ten minutes later, the priestess files in with her entourage (three assistant ladies, all about forty years old), and everyone in the room splits up, half and half, by gender. Ladies sit on the left, gents on the right. I'm corralled to a spot in the front row. At the front of the room, there is a row of cushions on the floor. Behind them is a waist-high dark lacquered altar, polished so finely it looks like a black mirror. On the altar, a large stone urn sits full of sand. The urn is flanked by a pair of golden candlesticks with long white candles. Behind them, there's an arrangement of melons, oranges, and rice balls- all round objects- on golden trays. On a higher altar sits a porcelain statue of the Buddha. This particular temple is dedicated to the Happy Buddha- this will be important later.

The priestess walked briskly up to the altar, bowed twice, and presented a long silver candlelighter to the statue. Bowing again, she lit a small oil lantern sitting on a shelf above the Buddha's head, just below five long, framed golden scrolls, each inscribed with a different sentence. Then, she stepped back, bowed again, and lit each of the candles. She stepped aside, and her assistants walked just as briskly up to the altar and stood on either side, bowing a few times to the Buddha, the priestess, and to us. Then, the assistant on the right began rattling off the fastest Chinese I've heard out of a Japanese person yet while the priestess knelt at the altar, produced five sticks of incense, placed them in the urn of sand and bowed deeply five times, hands and knees on the cushion. The assistant to the left counted the number of bows out loud in Japanese, while the one on the right just kept going. She repeated this process with more incense, bowing, counting and chanting, and then she stopped, stood, turned around, and smiled, launching into a short speech about all of these trappings being merely to focus- the emphasis, in this temple, is a very humanistic approach. I'll skip the metaphysics- if you're interested, just email me.

So the assistant on the left then produced a long, folded sheet of rice paper, and began to read names. There were five of them. The last one was my own. Seems my name's been inscribed in the ledger of the temple, and also on this ricepaper. She hands the paper to the priestess, who says a few short words to the effect of these names now being inscribed in the Great Big Rollcall in Heaven, and commences to light the paper on fire with the two tall candles to either side of the urn. Then, she sets the paper in the urn, kneels, and bows deeply. The paper goes up in flames almost immediately after her head touches the cushion, and the ashes leap into the air, rising on the thermal current. Impressive.

The priestess rises, and calls the names more slowly. Each person responds with a loud "Hai!" as their name is called- like roll call at school. The people called step forward, and kneel on the cushions. Not wanting to disturb, when my name is called I too respond loudly, step forward, and kneel.

There's an older guy to my left, and a middle-school aged student on my right. The older guy is balding, wearing thick glasses. He draws five sticks of incense from a pile on the altar, and sets them one-by-one into the urn. We all bow five times while the assistants do their thing. After we rise, the priestess walks among us, talking very quickly about how happy she is we've decided to pursue enlightenment despite our ages, lifestyles, and nationalities. WAIT, WHAT?! PURSUE?!

She winds through the line of kneeling people, showing us how to hold our hands, anointing us with the smoke from a bundle of burning incense, and very soundly striking us on the head (OW!) to open our third eye- the "genkan", or "entrance". Then she tells us a few secrets- now, I may be dumb enough to blunder into a Buddhist initiation ceremony, but I'm certainly not dumb enough to blab everything I see- that's surefire bad karma, and my new protector the Laughing Buddha might stop laughing and kick my butt.

After the secret-secret stuff, we stand, and bow another couple of times for good measure, and return to our places. She says a few words, and we break off into two groups- an English-speaking group, consisting of me, two Chinese kids who are regulars at the temple, and my "insurer"; that'd be the "friend" who got me into this mess- and a Japanese speaking group (everybody else). They pull me into a smaller room alongside the main hall, and we listen to a tape of an older Japanese gentleman explaining, in English, a few "Buddhist Basics". Afterwards, I make sure I haven't just joined a cult (nope, not yet) and ensure that I don't owe anybody any money (no, not a pyramid scheme either), and that there will be no lasting consequences (not in the least). Turns out that this whole "welcome to the family" thing is their way of including me in the community- almost everybody in Japan has their name on ledger at a temple and at a shrine (covering both your bases, Buddhist and Shinto) and my friend wanted to make sure I was covered.

So we skip back into the main hall, and catch the end of the Japanese secrets explanation- it's quite more in-depth than the English one, and I wish I had been given the option to tough it out in a foreign language. Pretty interesting. Then, they close with more bowing and counting, and the priestess waves out the candles one by one with a fan, ending with the oil lamp over the Buddha's head. We all bow a few more times, and chat over coffee in front of the temple.

Weird day. Winter break lasts until January 10th- if every day is this interesting, I'm going to need another vacation. On the upside, I'm told that the Laughing Buddha is watching my back for the next 10,500 years- at which point he gets to let the next one take over. So I figure I can afford to take a day off- he'll cover for me.

pax

Adventures, past and future (and typing, present)

2005-12-19T04:18:00.000-05:00

Though thematically inefficient, chronological order seems to lend a certain continuity to the narrative that'll get abandoned right quick if I stray from it. So, to borrow a certain turn of phrase from one Lewis Carroll (and leaving aside any metaphorical ramblings about borrowing turns and turning phrases, as well as the possibility of two Lewis Carrolls), we'll begin at the beginning, and when we reach the end, stop.

Holiday shopping in Kyoto is comprised of equal parts of modern convenience and the uncanny feeling that you're walking through a city that every so often benignly forgets what year it is- and decides to make do with snippets of years that it CAN remember. I present as evidence the fact that any of you who go to see the new Memoirs of a Geisha movie (insert necessary book plug here- I'm the inveterate bibliophile son of a librarian, give me a break- and if you somehow missed this book, go out and buy yourself an early Festivus Present- read it during the Airing of Grievances) will see a largely accurate picture of the present-day streets of Kyoto- just add electric lights. All of this lead-up is really just to lull you into a false sense of security, as the following picture really speaks for itself.

No. They do not know what "Political Correctness" means. I asked. I'm fairly sure that it's not pronounceable in Japanese- too many R's and L's. The burning question in your mind is: "What the heck does this store sell?!"

Jeans. I really don't get it either- sorry. We report, you decide.

The next day, I headed out to Otsu to finish up the shopping at Parco, the local megagiantmall. Eight floors of boutique stores, one floor of dining, a bookstore, a movie theater, and enough capitalistic goodness to make me feel right at home. Besides, I feel myself strangely drawn to their ad scheme- it speaks my language.

Kinda.

But who's that little guy next to the exclamation point after "HAPPY GIFT!"? Could it be....?

Santa Mario, patron saint of video games and ever-enduring symbol of Christmas. I love this country.

On the top floor of Parco is an arcade and a food court- I last visited there with Dockett. This time, I wandered around the arcade and found a row of machines that were never empty. Never. What were they?

Purikula. It's the Japanese Sticky Picture Craze- every schoolkid in every one of my classes has a notebook full of little pictures from these oh-so-trendy photobooths. They and their friends enter through the side here, take a bunch of intentionally silly pictures, edit and draw on them on an attached tablet PC, and print out stickersheets at 400 yen a pop. It's amazing. They never get bored- they just run out of money. I need to buy one of these machines- I could live like a fatcat until the trends shift and I'm stuck with a half-ton semiportable photo lab. Best part? These machines speak my language too.

Kinda.

Full text: COME ON! COME ON! ALL FLASH!

"New Beam Space" to concentrate all various lights on, and 8 Megapixel stylish duo camera,
Innovative snap shot has come into the world! New variable "RAKUGAKI" function and
Particular COCOA tools pop up. Infinitely large enjoyment!

It's found art. It's poetry. It's the new name for my punk band. "Infinitely large enjoyment!" Our first song? "Come on! Come on! All Flash!" Gabba Gabba Hey.

Friday night, I went to visit a Japanese production company. I'll show you the pictures first, and then tell you what they do, because I'm a sucker for cheap suspense.

View from just within the front door- this is "reception"- just a long desk, and the beginning of the cube farm.

Everything in Japan is shorter. The normal folks work at these desks-without-walls on the left of the picture, and the bosses get the half-cubes (about a foot and a half tall on the desktop) on the right. It's not that they have no privacy- it's that they really don't want any. That'd impede the group work ethic.

Behind this safety glass and those reinforced doors are the Machines- the heart of this little production facility. Take a good look, see if you recognize them.

These beauties make potato chip bags. Just the bags. They also make electrostatic pouches for computer parts. And any other manner of puffed-air pillow packaging. The facility is bland, efficient, and makes a boatload of money- so much that in order to entertain their foreigner guest, they took me out to a delicious chankonabe dinner.

What's chankonabe? Sumo food. It's a big pot o' broth on a portable burner (hint: Nabe means "pot") and a plate of assorted meats and veggies that you toss into the boiling broth, and ladle into a bowl. When you've eaten all the meats and veggies, you then put udon noodles into the now-seasoned broth to soak it up, and eat those. Then you have rice with whatever's left- think "porridge" and you're spot on. If you're a sumo wrestler, you then go to sleep and gain a few hundred pounds. Since the party I dined with was mostly image-conscious female professionals (the local non-PC term is OLs, or Office Ladies), there wasn't so much an incentive for all of us to waddle off and fatten up- but it was still delicious.

Saturday and Sunday weren't nearly as newsworthy- I went to Japanese class, bought a snowboard for the insanity over winter break, saw the last of those outdoor collegiate concerts this year (too cold- they're hibernating for a few months), and had a few friends over on Sunday for dinner.

Today, however, I booked the package tour for Hokkaido- or, rather, my coordinator booked it and I nodded thankfully when she asked questions. It's 10% more exciting than last mentioned- I'm flying, rather than taking the train, and I'm staying in a hotel in downtown Sapporo. Yes, the city where they brew Sapporo beer- there will be restaurants in igloos (I kid you not), famous crab stews, ice sculptures, boatloads of snow, and a major city to explore in the evenings. I'm hitting four mountains in four days. There will be pictures in abundance. I'm going on the 5th of January, and getting back on the 8th, with snowboarding happening on both the day of departure and the day of return.

Best part?

Free breakfasts. In my case, free breakfasts, second breakfasts, late breakfasts and perhaps even the old "stuff a basket of croissants in the board duffel" maneuver.

pax

The Latest Thanksgiving

2005-12-10T21:48:00.000-05:00

No news is, after all, good news. I've taken the last little bit of time to be wholly boring and take care of some mundanities of life- you've gotta do laundry SOMETIME. I've returned to the first school I taught at, and will be there for the next two months- there's a big break in the middle for the weeklong new year's celebration, with a half-week break before and after the holiday itself. As such, I get to spend a lot of time with the Ritto Jr. High kids- and I am proud to report that they remember a great deal more of what I taught them than I did. I walked in the door on Friday, and happened to bump into a fairly familiar-looking group of girls hanging out in the front hallway before school. One looked up, smiled, yelled "Andoryu-Sensei!" and proudly raised the Horns of Rock. The rest followed suit. Even after a two-month absence, my rock band remembers.

So work is a lot of fun- the kids surprise me in little ways every day, from English they know (that I certainly didn't teach 'em- there's a group of the "cool kids" whose catchphrase is an exaggerated, over-the-top "Oh my Gawd!") to Rocking Out, to asking me for dating advice ("Andoryu-sensei, there's a boy in my class I like. What shall I do?")- of all the schools, this one has really decided to treat me like a member of the family.

A source of concern, however, is the fact that in two neighboring prefectures there's been a rash of disappearances and murders that seem to target middle-school and elementary-school girls. Just last week, in Tochigi, a second-grader vanished on the way home from school. Witnesses say that a man, 30-40 years old, drove up in his car, hopped out, picked her up, threw her in the back and drove off. Her body was found later, in a field.

This, understandably, has all of us quite concerned. We're kicking students out of school a half-hour early (4:30, rather than 5:00) so that it's still light out when they walk home. On Friday, all of the teachers got up and walked out of the teacher's room (largely without explanation!), and when I followed them out (this is a large part of my day, just kinda following the crowd and hoping I'm not screwing up) they explained that we were going to stand at all the exits of the school and make sure kids headed home in pairs or threes- never alone- and implore them not to dawdle. This took some work to understand- I'm not familiar with the vocabulary for "ensuring our children aren't abducted".

So far, nobody in Shiga's been a victim. But every few weeks, a note gets tossed onto my desk with the comment of "Please read this" emblazoned in English at the top that describes suspicious people near the station, or approaching kids on the street. It's a dangerous time to be a kid in Japan.

None of this seems to be fazing the students at all. They aren't afraid- they just go about their business, studying for the high school exams and worrying about the boy they like that sits next to them in homeroom. Just like American kids.

After school, after escorting the last students to the exit, I hosted the JET program late-Thanksgiving early-Christmas party. There were perhaps 30 English-speaking people crowded around a bunch of one-and-a-half foot tall tables in my living room, a DJ, and enough stuffing, mashed potatoes, and turkey to feed my entire Japanese neighborhood for a week. I'll be living off the leftovers for quite some time.

The next day, enjoying a post-Thanksgiving leftover luncheon with some friends, I was washing dishes when a pair of my students tentatively knocked at my door. They were riding their bikes by the house when they heard our loud English voices (my walls are like paper, held together at the seams with naught but good intentions), and they wanted to say hello. So we sat around and chatted. They were two of my best students, and as such impressed the heck out of the other teachers at the lunch. This is one of the things I love about teaching in a small town- my students are literally EVERYWHERE. I have not gone a single day without running into at least one in the street, or at the shopping district, or in a restaurant- and they all speak WAY more English outside of class than they do in school. During a lesson, getting one to respond or speak up is a combination of cajoling, pleading and outright trickery, but the moment the bell rings and they run into me in the hall, or on the street, they're downright loquacious.

After lunch, we went to Kyoto to pick up some Christmas gifts in the big shopping district of Teramachi. Teramachi, adjacent to the geisha district (yeah, that one- if you've read or seen Memoirs of a Geisha, you know what I'm talking about), has been a shopping center since Kyoto was the capital. There are stones in the sidewalk poudly emblazoned "Since 1670"- there are junk stores and doll workshops in this place one hundred years older than my country. We had dinner at Watami, a small-plates shop where the objective is to order as many different plates of food as you can, stuff yourself silly, and then order more. There's a central difference between dining in Japan and in America that makes itself evident at places like this- in America, you order ONCE, and that one order will supply you with enough food that you're not hungry again for a long, long time. In Japan, you are EXPECTED to continually call for more food. Everyone shares from small plates in the center of the table, and the sheer variety of dishes you can sample is mind-boggling. You almost never have just one thing for dinner, unless you're dining alone or at one of the many greasy-spoon Ramen or Donburi (the "stuff on rice" cheap-eats) restaurant.

After a marathon meal, we waddled back to the trains and shipped back out. It felt really late (the sun sets here at roughly 5:00 now), but it was still only 11:00. I made it home before midnight. I feel like an old man.

Next week is the last full week before winter vacation. I'm making a few elementary school visits, and as soon as winter vacation hits my adventure season begins. I'm going to visit Kobe (why? Why not?) with the proprietor of my local Ramen shop (cool guy!) and then I'm going to buy a "Juhachi kippu", or "18-ticket", that gives me unlimited rail access for something like a week. The plan? I'm heading North. I will have a white Christmas in Hokkaido- evidently, it's the one place nobody goes over the winter break. Not sure if they'll have Internet access up there, but that's a bridge I'll burn when I get to it.

Today? Today, given my zig-zag insanity the rest of the week, I think I'll go relax by the lake in Otsu- it'll be cold, but that city EMBODIES the lazy, sleepy, laid-back Sunday.

pax

One Half Kilo of Meat or 100,000,000 yen

2005-12-01T02:33:00.000-05:00

Today, the sixth-graders went on a field trip to the local playhouse to see the Merchant of Venice- in Japanese. I am here to report that they take Shakespeare's "comedy" tag quite seriously on this island. The performance was done entirely in over-the-top slapstick boasting a physical comedy routine that is neither in the script nor would be out of place in a Charlie Chaplin film. In fact, it seems they stole the acting routine right out of the exaggerated Japanese Kabuki style- which, despite it's international status as high art, is in fact the hammiest crowd-pleaser this side of a Three Stooges act. Trust me.

So anyways, they managed to sidestep the curious anti-semitic angle by downplaying the religion angle. How, might you ask? Well, they still call Shylock a Jewish moneylender, but they dress him up in Chinese-style black robes. Antonio's goodness isn't borne out of inherent Christian Decency, it's his responsibility towards his friend- as that friend is a member of Antonio's in-group.

For more interesting cultural notes, consider this: The trial of Antonio is held with both parties (Shylock and Antonio) sitting in the traditional Japanese style at the front of the stage, and the assembled others standing around behind them. Thanks and goodbyes are with deep, Japanese-style bows. The language itself was very, very colloquial- no old and convoluted grammar to mimic the style of the original. The famous "Pound of Flesh" line is rendered as "One Half Kilo of your Body Meat, or 100,000,000 yen." Rough exchange rate.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but there aren't a whole lot of "You idiot!" lines in the original, right?

There were at least six. Every single one was followed by somebody getting smacked.

After the very Japanese interpretation of the Merchant of Venice, the actors pulled a gaggle of ten students onstage to teach them the fine art of Japanese acting. Two were pulled offstage at the very beginning- one girl, one boy. More on them later. The rest were put through a gauntlet of breath exercises and vocal practice that sounded like a really long, incomprehensible tongue-twister. I turned and asked the Japanese teacher next to me what it meant. She looked at me with a confused expression, and simply said: "There is no meaning. It is... from Kabuki. Just odd words. Blablabla." The first three sentences were in Japanese. "Blablabla" was all English.

So the kids each took a turn yelling this string of oddity across the stage and into the audience, and then they were told to take their seats again. The pair of volunteers that got swept off the stage at the beginning returned, clad in the costumes of the lead romantic male and female parts. The crowd went absolutely wild. The one in the lead male (Bassanio)'s costume was to read a short soliloquy on how he was a changed man, having recieved the ring of his beloved- and then (SCANDAL!) they were to embrace. Certain that this would be a problem (remember, to a middle school boy, girls are ICKY), the actors and actresses interceded, and each half of the romantic pair got to practice with their counterpart professional- with hilarious results. After two minutes of practice, the show was on.

Bassanio approached Portia, his beloved, and timidly held out his hand. Portia demurely placed the ring on his finger with the romantic aplomb of a woman intent on getting this over with as quickly as possible. To Bassanio's credit, he turned to face the audience and held the hand bearing this trophy high, spewing forth a lush, five-minute speech in Japanese that essentially translated to: "I am a changed man. I feel different." Then, he turned back to his paramour and the two collided for one brief instant, each quickly spiraling off into their respective corners like wounded boxers. Needless to say, the crowd LOVED it. It brought a bigger applause than the real show. Kids were out of their seats screaming for more. After some congratulatory speeches and some more bowing, the show was finished.

The best part, for me, was noticing about halfway through the show that all the male actors were wearing discreet, height-enhancing footwear. I can deal with the melodrama, I can dig the overacting, but the sight of a man in patent-leather pumps with a two-inch heel just shatters the suspension of disbelief every time. I pointed it out to my fellow teacher, and she nearly died laughing. She saw it in Act I, and didn't think anyone else would notice.

How can you NOT NOTICE guys in heels when all the women are wearing flats? Sure, it'd look weird if Portia loomed over Bassanio, but these were some SERIOUS shoes. At least Shylock's robe concealed his a bit- the rest of the men, in their brilliant white tights, had me wondering if this were a showing of Rocky Horror.

pax

Peace out, Dockett

2005-11-29T06:43:00.001-05:00

Once again, I boarded my favorite means of transportation- the ultrahighspeedsuperfast OH DEAR SWEET JIMINY look-at-it-go Shinkansen Bullet Train, which is as close as a human being can get to flying without getting strip-searched by the Transportation Authority, and visited Dockett. Tokyo is fun, and getting there is a tiny adventure in itself. The food (which they serve airline-style, on an efficient plastic cart that bangs your elbows- some things never change) was delicious, if small, and the coffee was hot. The view was, regrettably, pitch dark, as I embarked on this adventure after teaching 100 sixth graders how to say "I'm angry!" (it was emotions day at the elementary school, and they decided that instead of having me teach four classes of the kids, it'd be better to lump them all together and throw them in the gym) and as such I saw no Mt. Fuji. It evades me to this day.

More on that later. So I showed up in the train station, met up with Dockett, and wandered around looking for interesting sights in Shinagawa. It seems that the only interesting sight in Shinagawa is a water reclamation plant. Yech. As expected we had to find somewhere else to have dinner.

After dinner and a short stint at the local yakitori joint, we returned to Dockett's charming one-room closet-sized apartment, and called it a night.

The next morning, shaken awake at 7:30 by the Rising Sun (guess that's where they got the name), we staggered to the McDonalds for a pick-me-up in the form of a Egg McMuffin. These things are the same in every nation, and in every nation they're delicious. Then we went to the Tokyo Metropolitan Building, and got to see the whole city from the air. It was, unfortunately, smoggy. So not a whole lot of love there.

In the name of absolute tourism, we decided to wander into the Park Hyatt Hotel. This was the hotel, by the by, in which the movie "Lost in Translation" was set. We saw no Bill Murray, but I assure you that it looks entirely the same as the movie- in fact, should you want to get a good glimpse of the areas we bumbled around, go rent that movie. Warning- it is a bit of an acquired taste.

After our movie-tastic wanderings- which included a park full of homeless people, photo shoots, baseball practice, and Yakuza getting their hair cut (yeah. Really. I wouldn't lie about that)- we headed over to Jimbo-Cho, which is A) Not very Photogenic (sorry) and B) Mecca.

Jimbo-Cho is the bookstore district of Tokyo. It's city block upon city block of really cool small used bookstores that look as if the backstacks of the Library of Congress had been persuaded to yield up their dead in great burgeoning piles. Yellowed stacks teeter from floor to ceiling, and they gleamed with possibility. The only downside to this is that it's a giant district of Japanese used and new bookstores, and as such nigh impenetrable to me. I can read a lot. I can piece my way through everyday interactions. But I cannot, for the life of me, pore through 16th-century tomes of literature in Japanese yet. It actually makes me feel a little sad- there's a vast storehouse of knowledge that I can't really access.

After that slightly sobering and wonderful experience (it was real close to religious, let me assure you) we caught a light lunch and sojourned towards the Imperial Palace. It's closed up, pretty tight, but we got to see a lot of sturdy-looking gates, armed guards, confused tourists and marathon runners (who I honestly wish would have worn some more modest pants- there are things you just can't UNSEE) which on the whole was pretty interesting. The walk, however, was an undertaking not to be entered into on a whim. It was crazy. I'm sure there are subways in this city- I've heard of them- but we scorned the subway in favor of the good, healthy, bracing walk.

Which continued all the way up the hill to the National Diet Building (governmental, not gastronomic), the National Theatre and Library, and a strange, wondrous block of artistic-looking concrete. We had no idea what it was- there were no signs, no guidance- so I stopped some folks on the street, put on my best Japanese, and asked 'em. They told us that this:

Is the Supreme Court Building. It is exactly the kind of building I would expect from a Ministry of Justice. No stodgy, staid Department- oh, no, it's a Ministry, with all the cool architecture and possible Orwellian overtones that suggests.

After basking in the shadow of Justice for awhile, we decided to bop over to Asakusa, which is a few looooooong rows of souvenir stalls buttressed on both ends by giant gates bearing huuuge paper lanterns. Pretty cool. There were also some crazy-costumed folks awaiting the giant fall festival that was due that day, but no matter how long we wandered around we couldn't quite find it. So we decided to bail on that, and descend into Tokyo's seedy underbelly in search of icecream.

Evidently, the Roppongi district has a bad reputation. Evidently, it's a wretched hive of scum and villainy not entered by people of good taste or breeding. It is a fine thing that Dockett and I aren't the type to believe rumors. We wouldn't have found this:

It's a giant shopping mall! In the mall, there was this store- you can see it above- that is, I kid you not, named "White Trash Charms." It sells jewelry, and a hearty dose of culture shock. The mall itself is surrounded by embassies. We found the Chinese embassy, the Spanish embassy, and the American embassy all after we found dinner- but I get ahead of myself. First, we grabbed a bite to eat in a 2F diner- all the cheap eats in Japan are either on the second floor or in the basements of buildings, as groundfloor is too expensive to rent out to mom 'n pop places- and then decided to test our stamina.

In the mall, there is Japan's first Cold Stone Creamery. Those of you who have not yet walked this enlightened path of deliciousness, go now and find one- it's worth whatever means you employ to get there. Our means included a forty-five minute wait in a line that stretched around the block- which, evidently, is a short line for a Saturday night at the most popular fad in town. Like the McMuffin, in every nation it is delicious.

Full of ice cream and a sense of deep spiritual wholeness, we wandered past the American embassy and back to the train, and decided to go find some music. There's a district rather well-known for it's jazz houses and college-band venues, and so we decided to try and find it. We did, but only after enlisting the help of a very friendly and helpful family of young women (hey, do I ask the creepy guy for help? No. I ask the ladies. Will you blame me?) who in fact didn't just TELL us, they LED us all the way there through two train transfers and other assorted mass insanity. Their work was nearly for naught- it's a very cool, quirky, Ann Arbory kind of district, but it also closes pretty early on a Saturday night- not a whole lot was open. We did find some interesting signs, though...

After wandering around a bit, we called it an early night and SLEPT.

The next day, we explored the Imperial Sports Grounds- there was a festival that day, and it was pretty nuts. There was an a capella band singing "Someday my prince will come" in immaculate English- impressed the heck out of me- and enough people to conquer a small nation. Afterwards, we strolled through an upscale shopping sector (not Ginza, some other one), and I got this artistic picture of Dockett looking like he just strolled out of an episode of The Prisoner.

He is not a number. He is a free man!

That silliness exhausted, we wandered by the Secondary Palace, and came across a disturbing phenomenon. Hung parallel to the Japanese National Flag on all the lightposts was this...
Pentagrams. I'm disturbed, and a little afraid, but it turns out there's a good reason. Perhaps someone from that constitutional monarchy was visiting this constitutional monarchy- they've gotta stick together, and all. Kings and kingmakers unite.

After the fun at the palace, we decided to grab some quick curry at a fast-food curry place (they're everywhere- it's like heaven- and they serve quail egg curry...) and then it was time for me to get back on the bullet train and bid Dockett a safe trip home. He's coming back to you, the English speaking-world, next week- so go check his blog and wish him a fond farewell, or welcome, or however the heck your personal prepositional phrase will go. I myself think that this island is just a bit shorter for his leaving- though when he's gone, I get to be the tallest guy here. As I understand it, there's a crown involved, and parades.

Bye, Dockett. We'll miss ya.

pax