Weekend Review (mo ikai ne?)

This weekend- 3 notable things happened.

1) I went to a party in honor of the Liquor-store owner whose random acquaintance I had made previously (the one with the banjo). The three of us were there almost strictly for our novelty value as gaikokujin- so lacking an outline of set duties we just had fun.

memorable moments include

-Being (without prior explanation) being handed a plastic maraca shaped like a lemon (the other two JETs got tambourines) and being asked to play along with the band for a bit (in front of some of the wealthiest people in Murakami, no less).

-Befriending a Japanese pre-school boy who was the son of some of the guests- he sort of became our mascot for the rest of the evening, and helped us out.

-Watching our host (Tatsuro-san) change suits no fewer than 5 times over the course of the thing, and variously be guitarist, MC, and host.

Also the party's invitation roughly translated said something like "wine enjoyment party"- and it was all some of the guests could do to make it out under their own locomotion (some didn't).


2) I got a car! The story has a sad beginning- arriving in Higashi Sanjo and realizing that I didn't have my license to drive my car back (that's like going from Denver to Woodland Park, then realizing you've forgotten something critical, and having to go back for it the same day). Blah. Another damper was the discovery (once I got my car) that trying to park in Japan is like being handed a watermelon, and being asked to put it in a box with about .4cm to spare on each side. The watermelon can't touch the sides, and neither can your hands. Parking here is a such an assortment of 3-point turns and minute readjustments that one wonders why there aren't even more trains than there are.

Fortunately, with my new car comes great new-found freedom from the train schedules, as well as freedom to go where the train may not. I'm thinking about going for a drive just to get out and see the autumn foliage while I can, time permitting.

3) More preparation for the winter musical- (further explanations to follow)- but that was Sunday anyhow.

That's life- I'm completely out of it from teaching 3rd grade and below all day- so I'm going to slink off and relax somewhere away from the prying of little hands.

Hashi Game

I haven`t terribly much to add to my last post here- but here`s a bit about English teaching. specifically, getting overcrammed, overworked middle school students to enjoy English again. Generally speaking, well, you can`t. The kids are massively indifferent and have way to much on their plates.

One thing that I have found works, however, is an adaptation of the American card game spoons. Remember spoons? You pass cards around until you have 4 of a kind in your hand, and make a desperate grab at the spoons (or in this case hashi- chopsticks) in the middle. The person who doesn`t get a spoon is out, and the game continues. Change playing cards to vocabulary cards with English words and pictures, and hey presto! you`ve got a room of suddenly interested students. The 1nens still didn`t get into it (in America they would be 7th graders), but the 3nens liked it well enough to request to borrow the game during recess. This is a spike in interest which, if you`ll recall middle school, is pretty remarkable. I was very pleased- I`ll probably be making more decks of cards for more vocab sets as time goes by.

That`s all for now- sorry it hasn`t got more zing and sparkle, but education`s what`s on my brain. This weekend is practice for the musical, as well as a poorly-defined event I will evidently be helping to usher on Friday night. Remember the guy with the sake shop about a million posts back? He invited a few of us to come up and help with...whatever this is. All I know is to show up by 5:30 wearing a suit.
何ですかかな...

The Weekend Review

This weekend was an activity blitz for me and everyone else- we had one of our once-monthly national holidays on Monday (one of the nice things about Japan), so people took off for regions afar. I would have as well, but I had a car rental to attend to, so I made the most of my time off by going to nearby Niigata and checking out the sights. Events happened as follows-

Saturday:

The doorbell interrupted my late, towel-clad breakfast. I threw on a robe and answered the door to find three Jehovah's witnesses. I can't say I was terribly pleased that I had been dragged out from under my warm kotatsu to be proselytized in a language at yet which I am hardly proficient, so I told them that I had been a Theology student in college (a generous misrepresentation, to say the least, but I only know "shingaku," or "theology," and not the words to add the proper softness such as "minor" or "dilettante"), and that I was not interested in their special English language Bible study magazine. I was pretty polite, but still couldn't help but wonder whether they couldn't find anything better to do. I also have to wonder about their success rate- Japan is a very secular country that doesn't lend itself easily to the adaptation of Christianity (the whole "upside down kingdom" bit is much more radical in a country with a rigid social hierarchy than in the chaotic West), to say nothing of the Japanese Jehovah's witnesses' take on blood.


After failing to get saved, I went down to Niigata-shi to look at the Bandaijima Museum of Contemporary Art. It was chiefly devoted to one artist, who, in terms of modeling form, well... I'm sure he tried very hard. Apparently all his models were clothed in an inky mist, pierced only by the periodic effulgent body part. It wasn't a bad museum, but it was smaller than I would have liked, and the stronger work was all by different artists towards the end. It is, however, in the Toki Messe Convention Center, so I also went up to the free observation deck to have a look. Here are the pics-








This view provides a pretty good idea of Niigata-shi in terms of size, as well as Niigata-ken's climate and general environment. The observation deck is a sweet new deal, complete with a swank coffee bar and big plushy couches. Worth a visit, if ever you are in Niigata.

Sunday-

I took a 6-hour round-trip train ride to iron out 15 minutes of negotiations and paperwork for my rental car, which I will retrieve from the same location next week. Such is life. I decided to console myself by going to another art museum, this one the Niigata-shi Bijutsukan (page in Japanese). The collection features a very small number of very big names- Picasso, Redon, and Boccioni were all represented, but only with one piece a piece. The museum would have been an interesting but brief diversion were it not for an art show by the Niigata-ken artists council, which proved to be quite interesting. It held a colorful array of styles, everything from severe but well-rendered still life to paintings with whimsical and unidentifiable subjects, if indeed subjects they had. As the only foreigner at the event, I was also something of a celebrity, with the president of the council coming over (woman with short, spiky, fluorescent red hair- aged 50) and explaining everything at length to me in rather good English. Overall, a good event.

Monday-

Spent reading The Good Earth (which I highly recommend) and cleaning my apartment. I've also managed to acquire some acrylic paints (no mean feat here), and am trying to think of painting ideas.

For now, that's about the size of it. I'm off to plan a lesson for my 3rd graders, and have some lunch.

First Winter Storm (始めの冬の嵐)

The terrific storm that landed the other night remained all of yesterday, gradually moving from depositing cold rain, onward to some sort of strange frozen precipitation that wasn`t quite sleet, snow, or hail (I`d volunteer "sky poo" to fill this lexical gap- the stuff was heavy and miserable), to a heavy wet snow. People have generally said that the first snow would be sometime around the end of December, so you can imagine how well prepared I was in terms of snow boots and the like. I also tried to ride my bike to work this morning in order to stay above the slushy roads- this proved to be both comical and hazardous, and I won`t be doing it again.

Sakamachi and the surrounding land actually look quite fetching with a layer of snow on them- which is probably just as well because the stuff never melts during the long winter months. Here are some pics-

The Mid-week Shinbun

It has, for whatever reason, been a draining week. I haven`t any bad days per se, but I`ve just been worn out. I think some of it may be due to the fact that my 4th graders, whom I love dearly, haven`t quite got me figured out yet and it takes a little extra activity on my part to get them to warm up.

As a consequence of this, last night was spent entirely inside of doors, parked under my kotatsu, reading a Bill Bryson book about travel in Europe. I also ate several persimons. It was one of those nights where I would have gone to the convenience store to buy a candy bar, except that this would have necessitated putting on pants (presumably, at any rate- the cultural expectations bar is pretty low, and while people would no doubt be disturbed by a pantsless candy bar purchaser, they would probably attribute it more to my foreigner status than to oscilations in my sanity).

It was just as well that I didn`t go out anyhow- halfway through the evening a storm blew in that sounded like the world was ending, and kept it up until I went to sleep. Come to that, it`s still keeping it up, and there are periodic flashes of lightning outside my middle school windows. The storm also seems to have brought winter with it- it is very cold today, and between gaps in the clouds I could see snow on some of the mountain tops.

Today and tomorrow are school-wide exam days for my middle school students, which means that there is absolutely nothing for me to do. I guess I`ll go study Japanese or something. Writing this blog was supposed to take up some time, but I`m finding myself finishing it with a discouragingly large chunk of morning still ahead of me- which I`m going to go try and fill now.

Mada tsugi bura-gu no jikan.

Guess who got his camera chord back...

Life goes on here- the trees are finally turning some real autumn colors. The kanji for Autumn- 秋 -is literally composed of the roots for "tree" and "fire," which I kinda like. The weather is colder, and the kids are learning the English (hopefully).

The real news, however, is that I did in fact get my camera chord back- so here are pictures!

These first two pictures don't require any explanation- they would only be encumbered by one.




Here are some pics from the Murakami bamboo-candle Matsuri: a night of awesome candles, tea ceremonies, and live music. The former photo is at ground level (I didn't have a tripod), looking through a forest of candles into the shrine of an otera. The latter is also in a temple- the gentleman playing the flute was quite skilled. At the time that this photo was taken, he was playing an arrangement of the theme from Disney's "Beauty and the Beast." All this while Amida Buddha looked benevolently on.





This next pic attests to some things that are just different here. For one, especially in fishing villages, it is not unusual to see strings of dessicated, enormous fish carcasses dangling from the outsides of buildings. I have no idea whether they are being preserved for consumption, or what. Here's one of my co-JETs posing with one.



Next are some pics from a taiko concert I went to in Murakami. It wasn't Kodo, but the show was still very good.





Finally, today I taught my 6th graders about oomoji (capital letters) and komoji (lower case letters). I decorated the worksheet to make it less onerous for them, and was vastly entertained by some of the ways they defaced them before handing them in. It also makes me hopeful that even if they are doodling, they are doodling ideas that I started for them- so even if they aren't learning English, I am establishing a kind of rapport.






I'm going to eat some food, and play some Final Fantasy 3. No not 6- 3 (tanoshii!). Oyasumi.

Let`s enjoy mixing cultures!

Well, my camera chord is still lost over the foggy horizon. So here`s some more text for your mental mastication.

The election helped to bring to the fore some of the things that one always notices while living here, only more so. One that`s pretty hard to miss is the Japanese tendency to whole-heartedly and whole-sale adopt images and conventions from other cultures, without assimilating much (if any) of the original meaning or context. Every culture does this, no doubt (ever been to an "Asian restaurant" in America?), but Japan imports so much American culture that the sheer volume increases the odds of things going strange exponentially. Let`s enjoy this photo, for instance (that a friend thoughtfully posted on facebook for me):

mo sukoshi Obama-san da

This is a pretty impressive degree of devotion, considering all he has to do with the town is a common name (post-transliteration, although if the town were smaller it would be buraku Obama, which is pretty awesome). It`s also impressive considering towns in America that even supported Obama by a majority didn`t quite pull a stunt like this one (to my knowledge).

While I`m at it, there`s also the bizarre hortatory injunction "let`s enjoy (name of activity here)." It`s just one of those useages that, while technically correct, leaves a strange ring in the ear- particularly when used with certain "ing" verbs, as in "let`s enjoy eating." As Japan gradually becomes an English-fluent nation, perhaps constructions like this will enter the lexicon as "Japanese English" much as we have American and British English now, but I`m not holding my breath.

As far as the actual election itself went, the staff at my schools were good about humoring my enthusiasm, and I got to try to explain the electoral college in Japanese (the word "chigaii"- different- made a lot of appearances, but comprehension never showed. It might be easier if it could even be comfortably explained in English, after all). Needless to say I`m pleased with the turn-out of the election, although I thought McCain`s concession speech was artfuly done as well. I don`t know whether the ballat I sent whizzing over the Pacific made much of a dent, but it was still kindof exciting to send it whizzing anyhow.

Finally, a tidbit for wrapping up-
McCain`s name sounds to the Japanese ear like "makanai"- or "don`t lose." The race between don`t lose-san and small-town-in-Kyushu-san was, I think, monitered with a fair ammount of interest here. I`ll be curious to see how people react to Obama-san as his presidency begins to unfurl.