last days in pictures

I was insanely busy the last week I was in Japan. I will simply illustrate with minimal commentary. Sorry.

May 24. Went to Arima Onsen, a hot spring in northern Kobe. Kimochi ii!


May 25. Yukata and Yukata saleswoman. If anyone plans on having a yukata party, I am so prepared.


May 26. Yuka and partying, day 1 of 2. Yes, we did make parfaits, but I had to leave room for the subsequent ohagi, kinako mochi, and... third kind of manjuu I ate after that. They know me and my Japanese sweets too well (though even in Japan, it's hard to pass up ice cream. Best of west and east?)


We also dressed up in order to come downstairs and eat sushi. Yuka's mom is also awesome.


Also, Photo Booth rocks.


Transformed to gumis!


I didn't sleep over at Yuka's, because I wanted to get a lot of sleep at home due to illness recover. Actually, it would have been better had I slept over, because I rode the train one stop towards home before the trains were stopped for an entire hour due to a suicide near my train station, and at 11pm at night this was not reassuring. Luckily my host mom is the nicest person ever and drove me home and I slept.

May 27. Went to karaoke with Yuka, Yoko, and Misaki. Sang a lot of Mr. Children and Porno Graffitti!


Yuka made a Mr. Children themed photo album for me! Crazy good!


Self portrait with special Oguri Shun page.


Dinner involved shabu-shabu, thus raw beef.


And a table.


May 28. Last knitting club at school, which turned out to be a surprise party for me! Everyone was acting a little fishy, but I didn't realize that so many orchestra members would be there too. Safe to say, pretty successful surprise.


Rode back home and met up with Hinzy and Mhairi (I've been spelling her name wrong all along) at a train station. We chilled out, compared sailor uniforms, and talked about how I will be all alone in North America (well, at least without them). This gettogether was scheduled when I ran into Mhairi in Sannomiya accidentally a few days earlier (Sannomiya, the place of EVERYONE I KNOW.) Also, an example of how my english has started to suck, we needed a meeting place at the station, so I said, "okay, let's meet in the clock." The inside of the clock IS quite magical I must say, but we settled for meeting by the clock in the end.


Three North American girls.


May 29. Last day of school. Went to give my goodbye speech. Here we have Noriko, Yuka, and I.


Mari, Ayaka, and Nozomi helped me out returning all my books, cleaning out my desk, eating the giant bar of chocolate I received from my class... then we hung out with some of the teachers a little while, came out to the pond, took photos, walked down hell slope one last time, hugged, and parted ways for our respective train lines. End of my era as a Japanese schoolgirl.


Exchange students are messy the night before they go home.


May 30. Sent my luggage, went to the train station in the morning to catch my bullet train, and I had a whole party to see me off (Yuka and Yukari wanted to come too, but they were told that if they went to see me off, they would be suspended from school. Nice). But it was touching that this many people came to see me -- plus they all brought a little something -- Yuka's mom, ohagi and kinako mochi, the Uetanis -- food of all sorts, including a hot yaki-imo!! and a superb photo album with notes from family members, pictures of the area where we lived, etc. It was superb!


Bullet train + giant suitcase = small amount of leg room


Evian (a sure sign that Mo was here) and rice fields.


The hot yaki-imo the Uetanis brought me. Felt really stupid as a gaijin eating traditional Japanese country food, prepared and brought to me with awesome-host-family-love, while everyone around me eats mass-produced train bento. But, this potato was excellent.


Uratani mom of course made sure I didn't go hungry either -- she prepared tons of onigiri!


More sweets from Uetanis. These were... kuzu-mochi? I don't really know, but you have clear mochi, filled with different colors of ... red bean paste that isn't red. Kind of mysterious, but delicious.


Bullet train in tunnel.


A car ride, bullet train ride, train ride, and a 12 hour plane ride later, I have arrived back in my home country. And what better greeting exists, than a bagel?


moku dekita? Yeah, I'm dekita now. Now me and my bagel face new enemies: jet lag and culture shock. But hey, I'm Mo. I can dekiru.


24 hours from when I set out from Kansai, it was still May 30th. But I was home.

Tea Party + Danger, High Voltage (unrelated events)

After skipping my calc test yesterday and taking one final day of yasumi (resting), I pulled out my genki and made my way to school today! Since in the last ten days or so, the only school I had been to was half a day on Friday (which didn't really count because I was so sick and out of it that I may as well not have been there), so it felt like I had had a looong break. Mari brought me the chem notes from last week as she promised, all color coded and truly beautiful, I tell you, and I studied chem in the library first and second hour. I thought it would be impossible, as chem tends to be, but the test actualy went better than I expected, despite mixing up one of my aldehydes with my ethyls. But when people were doing post-test "what did you put for _____??" Discussions I was clearly as with-the-program as others.

Then I planned to study and eat by myself for a while, before meeting with my tea ceremony teacher, but the members of knitting club cornered me in the cafeteria and instead we just hung out and talked for an hour, which was certainly preferable to studying. The yarn was missing, but hey, they are technically orchestra club buddies too, so we could say the violins and cellos were missing. Anyway, last knitting club is to happen on Monday. Mari and Machiko told me I am not allowed to leave Japan before I teach them how to finish their multi-directional scarves. Good point! That would just be cruel -- teach the beginning, and the middle, and leave out the end. Though, actually I forgot how to end it myself so I'd better do my research before Monday. I am pumped for knitting club.

At 1:00 or so I left the cafeteria to go meet my tea ceremony teacher. I had missed my tea ceremony lesson last week, the tea festival on Thursday, and the tea ceremony lesson this week (yesterday), but when I called last night saying "sorry for missing class today, and can we have class next week because if we do I can totally come" my teacher was like, okay, but there's also this thing tomorrow if you want to come. Tea party!!! Except, I had plans to go to lunch with Okuno and Nagai sensei (my Japanese teachers), so I had to tell my tea ceremony teacher that I needed to call and postpone my plans with them. Okay, says tea ceremony teacher, if you *can't* come tomorrow, drop me a line, otherwise see you at 1:00 at school. Then I call Nagai-sensei, and ask if we can move the lunch to Thursday. Seems okay, but she has to call Okuno and make sure. If for some reason Okuno *can't* do Thursday, she'll call me back. This is getting more and more complicated. But by the lack of confrontation post phone-calls, it seems that all systems were go and both tea and lunch were okay. Why do I have so many overlapping plans with teachers?!

So we went to the house of one of my tea ceremony teacher's friends. There were about five women there, and we had... well, a tea party! If you're looking for times when knowing tea ceremony becomes "useful," I guess this was one of those times, although in order to "use" tea ceremony you do kind of have to go out of your way to have a tea party. Thus, if I hadn't known tea ceremony, I simply wouldn't have been at this event. So tea ceremony knowledge and usability is all sort of circular, I believe. But anyway it was ocha-rific. I was by many decades the youngest member, and as the guest I had to go first. It had been many weeks since I had done tea ceremony but I sort of remembered it well enough. I also ended up eating a great many lovely tea ceremony sweets for the first time in a while. Oh man are they good. The women there were nice, and they asked me questions about all the usual topics that come up (you know, the gaijin stuff), but also more tea ceremony related questions, and more what-are-you-doing-from-when-you-go-home-in-a-week questions. I said I would be a CS major starting from the fall, which got kind of a "huh?" response, but they seemed to decide that it was really good -- when I'm done with a program I can make myself some tea. Yes, I can totally see myself doing that in the middle of the night, finally my program is running, I THINK IT'S TIME FOR SOME TEA CEREMONY.

Okay, maybe not a likely scenario.

But if I get the tea ceremony urge, I can now TOTALLY DO IT, because today I received all the tea ceremony supplies one may need! It was so exciting! My bag of tea ceremony goodies included:

-chawan (tea bowl)
-chassen (whisk?)
-chashaku (teaspoon)
-chakin (ummm... cloth?)
-natsume (thing to hold the tea powder)
-matcha (the tea powder)
-kaishi (the paper you use to receive sweets)

I think that's about it. But I am so prepared. Maybe I need to keep these in my purse at all times -- what if there is a tea ceremony emergency!?

So the other important thing that happened at this tea party was...

I saw my sensei do tea ceremony!

This was the first time. Come to think of it, perhaps it's a little weird that I'd never seen her do tea ceremony, but she's always just sitting or walking around and telling us what to do, and we, the students, never see any more than little bits of when she tells us, "no, hold the ladle like this" and shows us for example. The other ladies at this tea party were not tea ceremony teachers like her, they had a more casual knowledge of tea ceremony (and thus occasionally asked little clarification questions in the middle) and one of them was telling me "what, you've never seen sensei do tea ceremony!?!?! You're in for a shock, it's compeltely different from when anyone else does it, because she's so good."

And actually it was kind of true! Although I think to some extent you have to be a trained eye to be able to watch someone and tell whether they are "good" at tea ceremony or not, it was very clear that yes, sensei is, well, a sensei. A master of tea ceremony, basically, so every single movement was completely deliberate and clearly had been made thousands of times before. I suppose any art is the same -- good dancers have perfect control of their body, good musicians know exactly where their fingers need to land. But despite all the small things I have managed to learn (how to breathe while wiping the chashaku, what angle to place the ladle at, which foot to enter the room with, etc.) there are plenty of places that I'm totally not thinking about (angles of my elbows or something, I don't know) that are also predetermined.

Ladle mastery.


Fukusa mastery.


Also, it might look like we're in the corner of the room in these pictures, but actually, we are kind of in the middle, off to one of the sides. It turns out that the tatami mats are arranged in such a way that would be perfect for tea ceremony -- if you turned the entire floor 90 degrees. It has to do with the arrangement of where the doors are vs. the lines in the tatami. When sensei pointed it out, I did notice that wow, the room was totally pi/2 radians different from the tea ceremony room at school, but I don't think I would have noticed it on my own. Or even if I noticed, I wouldn't have known that it was unideal for tea ceremony.

So then we took tea ceremony pictures of me, now that my camera was out. These are totally phony! I wasn't doing tea ceremony, but hey, fake tea ceremony looks just as good, or better, than real tea ceremony. I actually did start going through the ceremony as these pictures were taken though, so it's not SO fake.

Kamaete the ladle. I don't know what the word for kamaeru would be in english -- according to this dictionary, it means "to set up," but it also has something to do with the word "kamae" which has to do with posing. Anyway, in tea ceremony terms, it means hold the ladle as I am holding it, and make sure the inside is facing you, and peer into it as if it's a mirror. I can just imagine if they added to the violin, viola, and cello series, a Suzuki method of teaching tea ceremony, there would be tiny tea ceremony sets with tiny ladles with little mirrors in them.


In the long process of folding the fukusa (the orange cloth) with which to wipe off the natsume. When that is done, I must refold the fukusa the same way, in order to wipe off the chashaku (next picture).


Wipe the chashaku with the fukusa 3 times. And remember to breathe properly.


I didn't even get to making pretend tea in this photo-shoot, but hey, pictures like that exist (the culture festival, etc.

Tea party members! There was one more woman (who took the picture). The woman to the left of me actually translates Japanese poetry into english, particularly, old Japanese legends (most of which I have never read or heard). She just happened to have an extra copy of part of a translation she did of the Hagoromo story (which I only know because it's the story that the manga Ayashi no Ceres is based off of, and I've read that). She has a new book coming out soon too, which will be released in Canada I think.


After the tea party, I made my way home. On the walk from the station to our house, I finally got an umbrella holding bicycling woman on camera:


Unfortunately, she's not wearing a dress or heels, and it's not raining, so it's not quite the ideal that I have wanted to get a picture of, but at least we have the umbrella + bicycle combo.

And then, I came home, and sat down at my computer. I guess I had turned the lights on, but wasn't aware of it. Then, I was looking up something or another online and was about to go downstairs when I smelled something kind of burning. The windows were open so I assumed it was coming from outside, and that someone was cooking something or another. Well, that turned out to be true, except that the thing that was cooking was my futon. You see, I sleep in a loft area of my room that is raised. There is a railing, and over that railing my futon was draped because my host mom had been airing the futons out that day. However, the things I had failed to noticed were that a) I had turned on my lights and b) my futon was draping right over one of the lights in my room -- recipe for DISASTER. The futon was black there, charred, and there was actually smoke coming out. FUTON ON FIRE!!! Luckily, there were no flames, but as soon as I saw this I somehow managed to move the futon (without toppling it down on myself), turned off the light, and called to my host mom saying that the futon was burning. We took the futon down, put out the smoldering bit in the sink, and felt really glad that I hadn't burned the house down. So, lesson to you guys: be really careful around futons and light fixtures. A scary experience.

tip for exchange students: don't get incredibly sick two weeks before you leave. Plus, Japanese language learning links!

Yeah, so despite all my bimyou health ish (stomach pain, cold) at the end of April/beginning of May... on May 13th the stars aligned -- I changed host families, went to my last day of [non-school] orchestra, returned my cello to its original owner (I'll miss that cello), and come down with the worst sickness I've had all year.

First off, a four hour orchestra rehearsal is a crappy time to get sick -- I promise you, it doesn't look like a calorie-burning activity, but playing the cello is exhausting. However, I couldn't leave in the middle because it was my last day, and I had to return the cello, and Superman took us out to coffee and etc. So I didn't leave, and by the time I came home I felt like crap.

Then I moped around for a week feeling crappy. Literally. I didn't go to school, I stayed home by myself all day and well, used the internet for the first time in a while, studied a bit, watched dramas, and felt yucky. People kept telling me to go to school, and if I felt bad just go to the nurse's office and they let you sleep. But is that not just totally 中途半端 (half-assed)? Why not just stay in your own futon at home? So I did.　Will not recount in any more detail because I run the risk of boring you.

However, on Friday, Takashi, seemed to be worried from the pathetic emails I was sending constantly being like "i feel baaaaaaaaaad" (of course, disincluding the word "I," but for the purposes of creaing a natural-sounding translation I include it here). That, and the fact that I broke our plans to hang out after school because I went home early. Anyway, he came to visit me. In Japanese this is called 見舞い and we don't have a word for it in english I don't believe, but yes, "visiting a person when they are sick." He came over, and I was in my weakened state, coughing and hacking, and we hung out for a while, hopefully me not infecting him with my cough-of-death. He did, however, bring me this:


At least now SOMETHING was alive in this room (hint: not me).

We played with google earth and things of that nature and now is a convenient time to introduce some good links I have found lately.

First off, if you want to read about Japanese grammar or anything to do with the LANGUAGE, here is a really good language blog. Ususally Japan-blogs deal with people posting pictures of different flavors of Pocky, but this is a rare one that deals with the linguistics and deals with them well. Take a look if you're at all serious about learning Japanese: Nihongo.3Yen.com

And then if you want to put your Japanese into ACTION, check this site out that Takashi gave me. It's a forum type thing (think Densha Otoko and friends). The situation is that you have a girl, and she's found out that her boyfriend is cheating on her with this other girl. She and this girl are emailing via cell phone -- the cheater originally emails the girl on the forum, "Break up please, with S" (S being the boyfriend). Then the real girlfriend keeps asking people on this forum what she should say to the cheater. It gets REALLY funny, I promise. Go for it.
Part 1
Part 2

I think my favorite part is when the real gf starts interrogating the cheater, with a long list of questions -- "How old are you? What are your bust/waist/hip measurements? What's your favorite anime?" .... etc, with a slew of other questions, and ending with, "With the low birth rate problem and education problems, what will become of Japan?" and the reply that comes back simply says, "I don't watch anime. I'm 24."

So a couple more mopey days pass by, and on Sunday I actually feel remarkably better (not like, death). Takashi was supposed to come over for dinner on the 19th but I was sick and kind of asleep when he emailed me asking about it, so we pushed it back to the 20th which was a good idea, as by that point I had regained a little genki (though was still rather ick on an absolute scale). This time he brought a friend for the previous flower:


They're multiplying!!! Anyway we IMed a tired Jono who had just gotten back from prom, and, trying to sell Takashi on this computer, played with the ever-popular Photo Booth. A photo album was created, and added to one of the innumerable such facebook albums. I think this picture is really, really, just too big, and by gosh, too clear.



In conclusion, despite the occasional, "Mo, are you still alive? And... do you need chemistry notes?" kind of emails friends kept sending me, I think it was best that I bum around for a week getting better. Unfortunately, it did line up perfectly with the last week of school, so now I'm going back just in time for finals. This will bring a new dimension to the word, "wing it".

Experience the Kamome no Tamago

OK this is the most pointless post ever. But I was sick and at home alone and bored, so I decided to eat my Kamome no Tamago (given to me by Noriko, thanks!), so please come with my on my eating adventure!

First of all, remember that Kamome no Tamago is a delicacy of Iwate Prefecture, the geographical location of which is not well known down here in Kansai (I know I've said this before. This is review because it's important).

Comes in a lovely wrapped box, as so:


Open up the wrapping, take off the lid, and you have 11 lovely eggs waiting for you.


Egg leans, calm, cool, and collected, against the wall:


Open the individual wrapping, and the egg is nearly ready to hatch:


Blurry picture of a white Kamome no Tamago:


Take a bite, enjoy the deliciousness, and peer inside. What exactly IS inside of a kamome no tamago? The world may never know. The consistency is a bit thick, but not cakelike, sweet, but definitely not chocolate, and not quite bean-like enough to be anko. My theory? Sugar.


When you're done, you probably can't resist eating a pink one:


And that was your eggy goodness. 11 come in each box (6 white, 5 pink), and well, let's just say I don't have many left. Upon further exploration, it turns out someone else has found joy in the Kamome no Tamago as well, and done a very similar blog post to this one at http://www.sylvainbouchard.com/wpblog/?p=68 >_< I have just lost my originality. According to this person, the inside is "a sweet paste made of wheat flour, eggs and sugar." Sure, that's what some of the INGREDIENTS listed on the label are, but can we *really* believe them? After all, they didn't list "magic" as one of the ingredients.

sdafsdf

asdipfsdfdfds

goodbye world.

dfdfd.

language is a matrix

Imagine for a minute, you live in a world without pronouns. Take away the "I, you, he/she/it, we, you(pl), they" and you are left with a sort of identity-less lingual situation, but you are also perhaps one step closer to understanding Japan and its culture.

You see, tonight I was watching Bambino!, one of this season's dramas, starring Matsujun, who comes from a smaller, countryish town to work at Tokyo's top Italian restaurant. In his small-town existence, he works part time at an Italian restaurant and is praised by everyone -- he's young and overly cocky. But the harsh world of Tokyo exquisite dining puts him in the middle of a world that is way out of his league. It's really hard to describe, but if you saw some of the cooking scenes you would understand -- weird camera angles, blurred, dizzying effects, intense music, and everyone cooking at lightning speed with incredible focus and seriousness. Matsujun is a pure n00b, to say the least. He is fumbling about, washing dirty dishes that pile up faster than he can take them, but at the same time completely and totally looks up to the chefs he's working beside, aspires to become as good as them with complete genuinity.

And he's hazed terribly. The other chefs don't give him any slack whatsoever. Not only is he made to feel like he is unwanted there, and actually causing more disturbance than helping, but one of the characters, played by Sato Ryuta, takes a particular disliking to Matsujun, insults him, degrades him, when he is told to take Matsujun under his wing, deliberately does things that leave Matsujun to make many mistakes -- he essentially lets Matsujun's pride be a self-destructive force. For example, not telling Matsujun vital information about a recipe, etc., leaving Matsujun no choice but to fail.

In the critical scene following, Sato's character takes Matsujun out behind the restaurant, near the trash cans, and beats him up in the pouring rain. Beats him up until he's lying the ground beneath a trashcan, soaked in rain, face bloody, and then goes back to the kitchen showing no remorse. And what is Matsujun's reaction to this? To go back, apologize for messing up the stew, and keep going.

Okay, yeah, if you fall off the horse get back on has SOME merit, but honestly!! In the four episodes I watched, there were countless occurrences like this where I thought, "okay, it's now an appropriate time to take legal action," or "AT LEAST TELL THE FREAKING SUPERVISOR!" (who was not a bad guy). In one of the last scenes of the most recent episode, Matsujun pours his heart out to one of his fellow chefs. He has returned from Fukuoka or wherever he was from (originally he was in the Tokyo restaurant only for spring break), and in the process ended up breaking up with his fiance, and when he arrives in Tokyo they put him on staff as a waiter. This is a terrible disappointment to him as his love is cooking pasta, and never foresaw this. He pours his heart out to one of the other chefs, describing how depressed he is that he can't cook with them, that he gave up his whole life back home, his future wife, dropped out of college, is in massive debt, etc., and at the end this other chef just stares at him with icy cold eyes and tells him basically that he's a piece of shit for whining and that every single person who has ever had a job has gone through the exact same pain, you're nothing special kid.

Ouch on Matsujun. In another scene, after a lot of brooding in the dining hall, the head waiter has a heart to heart with Matsujun (this waiter, btw., is the evil magazine editor from the fall drama 14 Sai no Haha). He simply says, "I truly love my job, and I hate to see you smorting there because I wish you could enjoy it as much as I do." (Well okay, I don't actually know how to say "smorting" in Japanese, but I've translated the emotion.

Something about those two conversations totally struck home with me -- not that I have a chef-gone-wrong experience, but something about how they were written really made me think, "wow, that's EXACTLY what people here talk like when they are having serious/angry conversations with you!!" Perhaps this is why I like dramas so much? I can witness these conversations without physically being part of them?? Anyway, the point is Matsujun doesn't give up, he keeps trying and trying and trying, and has what I would consider WAY too much of a ganbaru spirit.

Ummm okay now I'm getting off my original topic (I started writing this last night, accidentally posted it before going to sleep instead of saving, and kinda lost my train of thought somewhere in there. Ahh, such is the world of blogging).

Oh right, so about this whole language thing, I recently ended up getting into a long cell phone email conversation with Takashi about the Japanese vs. American education systems (he had to write an essay for one of his finals, and he's studied abroad in New Zealand, but has no experience with American education institutions so he asked me for opinions). I sent a bunch of random disjointed ideas initially, mostly focused on the issue of getting into college, but also the whole school=your life (clubs etc.), amount of rote memorization even in the high school curriculum, etc. Somewhere in there, I mentioned something about how you get your identity from the groups you belong to, particularly school and school club, whereas America is all about ME, ra-ra individuality. I also didn't know how to say "identity" in Japanese, so Takashi helped me out there too. It's 個人主義 fyi. The analysis Takashi gave was essentially that if you look at the Japanese language, you often have sentences that have no subject. If you say "I want to swim" (sorry, weird example, but with normal examples like eating or sleeping you get into subtle distinctions between wanting to eat and being hungry etc. Wanting to sleep and being sleepy. You can't be swimmy.), all you say is the verb, in the "want to" form, so you're really saying "want to swim". A typical english exchange would go something like:

Ken: I want to swim!
Mari: Me too!

Whereas a Japanese exchange would more likely follow the pattern:

Kentarou: 泳ぎたい！ (direct tr: "want to swim!")
Mariko: 泳ぎたいね！ ("yeah, want to swim!" or "want to swim, yeah!")

On the one hand, this makes complaining in Japanese REALLY easy. You don't even have to specify yourSELF, all you have to do is say in a whiny voice, "cooooold..." On the other hand, in more complex sentences that also don't have subjects, it is sometimes really difficult to understand what is going on. Misinterpretations happen even between Japanese people. I remember back in September or something my host sister and her mom were having a conversation that had to do with putting out water, and because of the lack of subject in the sentence there was some misunderstanding whether the water was the water in the dog's bowl or the bottle of water in my lunch. Highly entertaining.

As Takashi put it, Japanese grammar and lack of subjects makes it such that you're erasing yourself from the sentence, and both sides of the conversation are unified. You're supposed to be thinking about the other person, and ignoring yourself. Thus, Japanese is a freaking vague language.

Also, this is one of the places where foreigners often fail at Japanese -- the way to spot a real newbie is someone who constantly puts an "I" at the beginning of their sentences. Yes, on your first day of Japanese class you learn, "Watashi wa Mo desu." (I am Mo) but really, in the end you'd better not use this. In the end, you're gonna want to use the self-degrading kind of formal speech and say, "Mo to moushimasu" ([I] am called Mo"). If you can master the whole no-subject thing and still manage to be understood, it's time to consider yourself a success at Japanese.

Speaking of "ignoring/erasing yourself," in the big Bambino breakup scene, Matsujun says to his fiance, "I want to go to Tokyo and work again at that restaurant. Come with me." She looks nervous, sits silently for a while, and then says, "No. I will NOT go to Tokyo. Even if I don't go, will you still go?" *pause* "Yes." (I'm sitting on the couch thinking, "yeah, Matsujun! Follow your Italian cooking dream!!") And the girlfriend says, "well, I guess we're over. You know what I liked about you originally?? To put it in nice terms, you are an individual. You always have your own opinion, and you're not like other guys who may be like, "Oh, what do YOU want, where do YOU want to go," -- you have a you. To put it another way, you're selfish. But that personality is what I liked you for originally. I just never dreamed we would break up over it." [Told of course, entirely without saying the word "you"]. And then she kisses him dramatically and runs away. What do you want to bet that by the end, Matsujun's going to go through a personality transformation into a more caring, selfless person (and a master Italian chef?) I'm sensing a moral message to the Japanese public here. [Though, not all dramas have happy endings -- most are significantly more bittersweet than your typical Hollywood. On the contrary, at the end of 14sai no haha, the 14 year old mother AND her baby survive, ready to face the world and its prejudice against teen mothers. However, Japan DOES have a low birthrate issue, so...]

I'm not sure what I think about all of this. On the one hand, it does create some sort of unity and harmony, I think, to the point where even *I* felt team spirit on culture festival day (and you know how big I am on team spirit). On the other hand, this is a society where you really, truly do have to conform. I don't know if it's "human nature" -- the need to express oneself. Not being able to do so due to a language barrier has shown me how frustrating it can be, (and Billy K would be smacking me right now for even MENTIONING human nature), but the people I know who seem happiest and most successful tend to be those who have found their niche in whatever group they belong to (aka their school club), whereas the people who haven't comprise the large number of hikikomoris (people who stay in their rooms all day staring at the wall, totally rejecting society) -- I see their point.

And, gaijin can never be a part of it. Physically and culturally. If you're not in this vauge, fuzzy, but unified "we" that Japanese sentences exist in, you're nothing. You're on the outside and you're not invited in. I think that's why you hear so much from foreigners who have lived in Japan for long periods of time that, "no matter how long you're here, you will never be Japanese. It's exhausting." There is an interesting, and a totally vague word that exists in the Japanese language: 向こう (mukou). This word, if you translate it into english, has any of the following meanings: "beyond; over there; opposite direction; the other party". In short, it's "anything that's not us." People use it to refer to something like, the opposite side of the classroom. You can be 15 feet away and say, "do you sit next to her?" "Oh, no, she sits mukou". But if I just say "mukou, we don't invidually wrap home-made green tea cupcakes to give to our friends on Valentines day" or "mukou, octopus makes up a significantly smaller portion of most people's diets" everyone knows that mukou means America here. However, some gaijin really like the fact that they aren't in-with-it and never will be -- it does to some extent give you some freedoms, and at times it does seem more fulfilling to simply look on as an observer than to fully participate (since even if you tried, you'd fail). To some extent, the whole country is just one big Japanese drama I'm watching. Sponsored by Honda, Docomo group, and Glico.

In conclusion, the mantra repeated time and time again in high school anthropology, "language is a matrix" has some merit. Of course then you have chicken/egg issues, but let's not delve into that. Another time I will reflect on my three least favorite Japanese words of all time: "chanto," "kichinto," and "shikkari".

Kyoto: city of my future?

I just feel it. I am going to live in Kyoto! Kyoto is great. It's not big or overwhelming, it has enough shrines to last a lifetime, mountains on three sides, a famous river, a long history (it *was* the capital of Japan!), really really excellent sweets (I can't decide between Kyoto's delectable yastuhashi and Kamome no Tamago... Kyoto vs. Iwate-ken -- what would happen in a duel?)... plus the whole anti-global warming thing.

In short, it seems like a place where I would like to go and think deep thoughts. While I am still relatively young. Because Kyoto is also FULL OF colleges, so you see a lot of young people walking around, more so than in Osaka or Kobe.

Anyway, the reason I went to Kyoto on Saturday was that Okuno sensei (one of my Japanese teachers/ person to help out exchange students) invited me to go to the Kamogawa Odori, which is a really famous theatrical performance done by Maikos and Geisha (Maiko = Geisha in training). It kind of amazes me that Geisha and Maiko still exist, and still have their own entertainment business of these performances etc. This year was the 170th year of the Kamogawa Odori -- in April there is another equally famous performance called the Miyako Odori. The theater is in Pontocho, the area right next to the famous Kamo river.

I went with Okuno sensei (pictured here) and her longtime friend's husband (the friend herself couldn't make it). Here we are by the Kamo river.


For some reason I didn't know this until Saturday, but remember how I have [probably] mentioned how Noriko spent a year as an exchange student in America (Pennsylvania)? Well Okuno sensei is an alum of our school, and however many decades back she was an exchange student at the same school Noriko went to. So she is Noriko's SUPER-SEMPAI, and it seems crazy that not only do these two schools have such a long history together, they aren't teaching Japanese there. In contrast, our school's program is what, four or five years old, and because we have Japanese classes, me and my exchange student sempai and my future kouhai can basically speak Japanese.

The river:


backs of riverside shops etc.


it says, "kamo gawa o do ri". One interesting thing is that while "odori" means dance, in the case of kamogawa or miyako odori, usually in words, you use the japanese character "o" お, whereas the character with the same pronunciation (but romanized as "wo") を is used for object markers, i.e. grammatical references only. However in the case of kamogawa and miyako odori, を is used. If you look it's the middle charachter on the building. I don't know why it's the other o but if anyone knows, please tell me. Anyway, interesting!


Kamo river again.


This little bird is the symbol of Kyoto apparently. Plus, a poster for the performance we're going to.


Evidently a really famous place to take a picture -- right outside the theater.


The first thing we did when we went in was to go and see real tea ceremony, done by geishas -- they know what they're doing in terms of tea ceremony. It turns out geishas do tea ceremony REALLY SLOWLY, which I guess makes sense, it's not a race, but I think there must be some sort of ideal tea-making rate which is slow enough to be calm and zen etc., but fast enough to produce tea at a reasonable rate? Of course she made one bowl of tea in like five minutes, so the tea we were getting was made behind the scenes (like most of the tea at culture festivals etc) and thus it wasn't very hot.


By the way she's doing what is called 立礼 (ryuurei) which just means that she's sitting at a table doing tea ceremony. The other kind of tea ceremony is 座礼 (zarei) which means you're sitting on the floor (in seiza of course) making tea. I like zarei a lot more for some reason. In the culture festival as well as this performance, it was ryuurei, but in the tea party on March 19th at school, the exchange students did zarei, if you look at those pictures.


The person who sits next to the person making tea and serves tea to guests when appropriate. In the culture festival, Mifumi did this for me, but of course that was a more informal environment so she was also the person whispering to me "kensui!! kensui!!" when I messed up the first ceremony.


The geisha neck makeup... sorry it's blurry, but no one was using flash so I didn't want to ruin the mood and be the only one using flash...


Tea, sweet, and the bottom of one pretty cool kimono.


Done with our tea ceremony experience, we moved towards the theater area, but stopped on this balcony to get another view of the Kamo River.


So the Kamogawa Odori. It was interesting, actually. I think it's more accessible than Kabuki or Noh styles of theater -- for one it's a lot shorter (two acts, unrelated stories, told in approximately one hour each), and second of all, I actually understood parts of it. Up until this point, anytime I had heard a bit of Japanese theatre it just sounded like complete jibberish to me, but I could actually make out some sentences etc. here. It wasn't too bad.

The first story was about these three sisters who lived in a house with a really nice sakura tree, and the housekeeper guy liked the oldest sister but she didn't like him back. Then war breaks out, and the two younger sisters are kidnapped and go missing (the youngest sister is also engaged to a samurai) and the oldest sister and the housekeeper are the only ones remaining at the house. The oldest sister grieves terribly, goes blind, while the middle and youngest sisters go on with their lives but captured and unable to meet the oldest sister. The housekeeper cares for the oldest sister, though at some point this sister finds the bridal gift she had given her youngest sister left out somewhere (it was some sort of cloth) so she has some inkling that they're still alive. During all this grief, the cherry blossoms do not blossom whatsoever. In the end the sisters are finally reunited, though in the meantime the youngest sister has died and left only a daughter, and the cherry blossoms bloom once again.

Part 2 involved two geisha sent from Kyoto to Tokyo and their journey. It was basically them walking around, meeting different people, getting kidnapped by bandits, crossing rivers, etc. They see mount Fuji (just like I did, minus the bullet train!) and get to a river which they are trying to figure out how to cross, when suddenly they receive word that they're to stop their journey and return to Kyoto. Bummer. This act involved more dancing, by both Maikos and Geisha, more singing, and a live "pit orchestra" (which was on the side actually, and involved instruments such as taiko, shamisen, etc., though no koto). Most of the actors were geisha (though like I said, in the second act Maikos also showed up and danced). I really thought the best actors, though, were those who were playing men -- particularly the samurai married to the youngest daughter in the first act.

I didn't take any pictures during the performance, and this is a blog post about last year's performance (every year they do a different story), but to get a feel for what the stage, actors, etc. sort of looked like, check out this blog post.

Done with the performances, it was time for a late lunch. It turns out that on the same day, Noriko and her mom were doing college visits in Kyoto, and so we were like, "hey, if possible, we should meet up!" So the entire time I was sending emails to Noriko and/or her mom about our location etc., and decided, "okay, let's meet up after lunch." Unfortunately, lunch took from about 2:15, when the performance ended, until 4 pm. It was one of those really fancy kinds of meals where they bring you a tiny bit of really neatly arranged food one bit at a time, so it takes freaking forever. Suishi-ization, my friends. Actually it did involve some sushi, which I didn't really like. The rest was good, but TOO LONG. Actually, we cut it short and told them to skip the end because it was already 4 pm. Then we left and headed over to Kyoto University -- Noriko and her mom decided to meet a friend there because it was close to Noriko's college and they knew I would be doing *my* college visit there shortly. Thus, we all met up at Kyodai, where I got introduced to Chihiro 速海 and I don't remember how to read that kanji in a name >_<...um... yeah. But anyway she plays the harp and sings and performs in Kansai, and although I never got to see her perform, I also thought we wouldn't be able to meet. But we did, with the Uetanis and my Japanese teacher (Noriko's super-sempai) and her friend in Kyoto. Fate!


This time with my Japanese teacher's friend, who had mostly been photographing. Yeah, I really can't learn names. I've just given up.


Shortly Noriko & friends had to go home, but we toured around Kyodai, despite the fact that it was a Saturday afternoon so the place to buy sweatshirts etc. was closed... how depressing.

The college brochure-type shot.


A club was meeting somewhere around here.


Briefly stopped in the cafeteria while looking for the school store. Didn't get a chance to eat there, but hey, fake plastic food yumyum! The cafeteria itself wasn't as cool as Todai's, unfortunately.


Though there weren't actually all that many people walking around, the people I did see did look intelligent (as I can say from my oh-so-vast college visiting experience), and on average way more happy than the Tokyo University crowd (though they looked smart too). On this trip I didn't find anything to disprove my theory that Kyoto is the happiest city in Japan. Here we have more campus buildings.


The same building as before -- on what appears to be the club activities part of campus.


At this point we had run out of time, and I needed to buy omiyage for various people, so we went back to Kyoto station and bought stuff and then came home. Kyoto is really great. I'm getting a little better sense of the city now that I've gone multiple times (this was my fourth time there I think). The best place by far is the bamboo forest I went to at the end of summer break, but to get the best experience there you have to go on a really hot day, in order to feel the contrast when you enter the magical world of refreshingly cool bamboo.