Sunday, June 28, 2009

Morning Market, and some other things in Murakami

One hot June morning, Flo and I decided that we should go to the asaichi, or morning market, together. At some point between the last post and now, Summer got under way in earnest, and the air coming off of the sea of Japan feels like it was exhaled by some primeval, gargantuan dog, and we were already sweating profusely after just a few steps out her apartment door.

While she was on a hunt for good presents to send home, I was mostly taking in the sights and smells of the market, which both tended to be fishy. The market is a sort of standard farmer's market setup, with temporary booths holding a variety of things lining both sides of a narrow street:



The smell of the place, as I mentioned, is pretty fishy. The street even retains a sort of corpulent eau de poisson up to days after the market has disbanded. I'm sure that the juices dripping off the largely unrefrigerated fish onto the asphalt in 90 degree heat goes a long way towards contributing to the smell, as do things like this (please click to enlarge):



...or this. I thought that this fish looked resigned to his fate in an exhausted kind of way:



Here are various Japanese food offerings, whether to be used for cooking or simply to stuff onigiri:



These too were sitting out without any form of refrigeration that I could see. The Japanese are, as I'm sure I've mentioned before, more comfortable with letting things sit out longer than Americans are. I've never gotten over my fear that I'll be horribly food-poisoned by some flaccid, lukewarm morsel or another, but so far my luck seems to have held out. So has the luck of everyone around me, which probably speaks more to food being safer than I think than it does to anyone's luck. Food poisoning is also doubtless kept at bay by the Japanese tendency to take anything that isn't kickin' fresh and deluge it in salt and/or vinegar, thereby preserving it for future generations to enjoy.

On the way back from the market, also decided to take some pictures of the elegant kamon that decorate many of the houses in Murakami. I liked the design, and even though it's not on topic, I wanted to share it here while I still remembered:




Finally, I leave you with something Flo and I found at the local Jusco. Where someone may someday write an elegant thesis about the strange fusion of technology, mythology, and psychology that goes on in Japan (indeed there is a whole genre devoted to cataloging and explaining the idiosyncrasies of the Japanese), I have decided to present a picture that may be able to sum it up better. Behold: Dinotank (click to enlarge).



That is all for now- as I am ever more engrossed in extracting myself from my life here and packing my possessions, posts will probably be more erratic in both timing and subject matter. Thanks for bearing with me, and look for another post on something Japan in this same space sometime this week.

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Nihongolalia- the direct translation

I noticed something the other day, and I wanted to get it out on my blog before my hectic life and short attention span sweep it completely from my memory. The thing I noticed (or continued to notice) is this: Japan, in both language and culture, is really its own entity. We're used to thinking of multiculturalism in terms of arts, music, and food in America. If there's a cultural event event, you can bet that someone will be there in traditional dress, someone will play a traditional instrument, and everyone eats their tacos/egg-drop soup/sushi/borscht and goes home happy. While this is an oversimplification for any culture, it is moreso in Japan. I may have mentioned previously that the Japanese not only speak a different language, but actually say different things from Americans. The wires up there, for someone raised Japanese, are relaying different signals to different places than they are in people elsewhere (again, I imagine that this is true for all cultures, but the Japanese are so idiosyncratic it becomes apparent much more easily).

As an example, I will first post a conversation- two people being introduced by a third party, as you might read it in an American phrase book. Then I will translate the meanings directly from the Japanese. Some differences should be apparent.

Phrase-book translation:

Mr. Nakamura: Good Morning. Mr. Jugoarashi, this is Ms. Uchiyama.

Mr. Jugoarashi: Nice to meet you, I look forward to working with you.

Ms. Uchiyama: Nice to meet you, and likewise.


...then here's the literal translation (and just for fun, I've translated the names, too):

Mr. Middle Village: It is early. Mr. Fifty Storms, this over here is Ms. Inside-the-mountain.

Mr. Fifty Storms: It is the first time. Treat me well, please.

Ms. Inside-the-Mountain: It is the first time. Treat me well, please.


Just thought I would post that, as I find some of the differences to be amusing. I also love first names in this country- people with names like "Ryu" (Dragon) or "Emi" (Beautiful Image) are pretty much the norm- making it sound, to American ears, like every child in Japan was named either by a hippy or by a some serious LARPers. It also gives me something of a name inferiority complex: some days I just don't feel as cool as I might if I was named Dragon. Anyhow... That's all for now- I hope that some of the cross cultural strangeness is as interesting to you all as it is to me.

Monday, June 15, 2009

Sasagawanagare

Sasagawanagare (笹川流- bamboo-grass flowing river, although no river is in evidence), is an absurdly picturesque destination along the coast of the Sea of Japan, which also happens to be pretty close to where I live. I have been here several times; it is near to Sanpokku which I wrote about in a by-now ancient post, and was also the home of the dramatic rock formations and salamander shrine seen in this post.

This time around the weather was gorgeous, with a blazing sun and cool sea breeze (instead of the strident Siberian blast that characterizes Winter weather hereabouts), and I also took some time to photograph the rock formations that I've so often admired from the highway, but never actually gotten out and photographed. Here are the pictures that I deemed fit to print, as well as some explanations (as ever- click the photo for an enlarged view):

Our first stop was the rocky salamander shrine, this time covered in flowers and seagulls (and therefore, seagull droppings). The gulls were incensed about having their nesting area invaded, and we snap a handful of pictures before beating a path to lower ground:



This picture is looking out from a deep divide in a cliff wall across a bay. There are several stone arches in the area, which is eroding rapidly due to the intensity of the wind, water, and harsh winters. I tried climbing a rocky prominence just outside of the frame of this photo, and turned back when child-sized chunks rotten rock dislodged at my touch.



The cliffs from a higher vantage, which was also fairly terrifying to climb to.



Depending upon one's perspective, the water at Sasagawanagare holds a brilliant pallet of marine colors. The combination of shockingly blue sea water, rocks, seaweed, and who knows what else gives every foot of the bay its own chromatic personality:



This is looking out towards Awashima (the island faintly visible to the center right), past some of the rocky crags in the bay. The sun was dazzlingly bright, so I snapped my shutter down pretty tight to take this one:



This is just another shot of the side of one of the inlets. Not much to comment, I'm just trying to give a good idea of what the place is like.



The most dramatic arch in the area, as far as I could tell. The tree framed through the center is typical of the pines that cling to the rocks in the area- scraggly and elegant. I may have once mentioned; the prints and drawings of Japan with it's cloud-draped mountains and gnarly, graceful pines always struck me as being highly stylized, that is, until I moved here. Granted, they are highly stylized, but once you've had a chance to watch nature at work for a bit here, you realize that the artists were really drawing what they saw more than one would have thought possible.



Sometimes your pictures contain more than you realize. I just wanted a shot from low down of the rocky coast, but I also accidentally managed to show how much of a trash-heap the coast of Japan has become. Enjoying the beauty of Japan increasingly requires strong selective attention skills, and despite the accords being signed in places like Kyoto, Japan still has a lot of work to do on environmental issues.



On a more light-hearted note, I love the signs warning of big waves along the coastal highway. The really scary thing is that during a good storm, this isn't exaggerating that much...



...nor is this one, which I'm seriously considering having made into a T-shirt.



This is exactly what you probably think it is. It's still fairly common for Japanese towns to have penis matsuri, and to parade the thing around while the local women ride it in hopes of boosting fertility. I've never been to one myself, but I think it's pretty amazing that a fertility rite like this is still practiced in ultra-modern, ultra-industrial Japan. In any event, they are still plentiful, and this one lives just off the highway near Sasagawanagare:



Finally, a shot from a high point on the mountain road we took towards the end of the day. The road proved, hilariously and after several kilometers, to be an abrupt rock-wall dead end, but some of the vistas along the way were worth it. I'll leave you with this- cloud shadows over the Sea of Japan.

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

No Strong Unifying Theme

I wanted to put up some general photographs of Niigata; places or things that I've seen that don't attach to any one particular occasion, but that were good enough to warrant pulling out the camera.

This first one is taken from the slopes of Tosakayama (鳥坂山), or "bird slope mountain." The mountain was well named, as the hike up was more vertical than anything. These are the rice fields in the Kurokawa river valley, leading back towards the Tainai ski area:



On the same hike, I ran into a tamamushi (玉虫: lit. "round bug") at the summit. I don't know why it's called "round," as it's obviously not, but the term tamamushiiro, meaning "tamamushi-colored" can mean either iridescent or ambiguous (click image to enlarge):



This is a rice field just at planting time. I stopped and took the picture on my way to visit a friend in Murakami. The fields didn't have any rice growing in them just yet, so the whole coastal plain from the Sea of Japan to the mountains was a massive, watery quilt:



This picture was taken from the deck of my apartment: a storm gathering over the mountains. Most of the storms that actually amount to anything seem to form over the sea; this one petered out shortly after taking the picture.



Patches of cloud and sunshine over the rice fields just north of my house. The green speckles on the fields are the newly planted rice seedlings.



A close-up of the newly planted rice, with evening clouds reflected in the water.



This is an unremarkable photograph with a bit of interesting history- according to a sign, this feux-oil well stands on the sight of the oldest oil well in Japan, operational about 600 years ago. The next-door town takes its eponym from the actual kurokawa (黒川: "black river") next door, which in turn got its name from oil naturally leaking into the river in ancient times. Before wells were constructed, people would harvest the oil by dipping brushy branches into the river, after which the adhering oil was scraped off into a bucket.



One of numerous Christian signs that hang around the prefecture, and I think perhaps all of Japan. The signs usually carry some simple slogan, and then simply cite "Jesus," or "The Bible," leaving specific notation out of it. This one says something to the effect of "The blood of Jesus cleanses of sin. -The Bible" Christianity's long, strange relationship with Japan hasn't shown itself to me much since I've been here, although I do see the occasional church or cross. Any outward expressions of faith seem to be limited to austere, black and yellow signs such as this one:



I took some friends on a trip to Hagurosan, partly because I wanted to see it again, and partly because such things are better shared with company. On the way up, we stopped at a small salt-making shop in Sasagawanagare, the ludicrously scenic coastal strip north of Murakami. This man seemed pretty unexcited or disappointed about having customers either way, and just went about his business making salt. I did managed to get out of him that the salt takes about 10 hours over heat to crystallize out of the water. The facility was full of rusty surfaces, steam, and little bit of salt crystal clinging to the various fixtures:



Here is the main torii at the pilgrim's gate to the mountaintop shrine at Hagurosan I just included this photo because I liked it, and feel like it captures some of the mystique of the mountain. I won't go into detail because I've already been here once, and you can read that post here.



That's all for the random pictures post, I hope it was enjoyable. What's next will likely come after this weekend, when I will be attending a fighting kite festival. Until that time, yoroshiku, onegaishimasu

Monday, June 1, 2009

June 1st: International Youth Introspection Day

This post is being written on a stomach full of ika (squid) from today's school lunch. They pound the surface into a texture resembling that on a meat-tenderizing hammer, and then cook it for a good long time (presumably to aid with polymerization or something). Just an anecdote, but some days are better than others, with regard to school lunches.

~

I'm starting to feel the pressures of leaving, and wavering between excitement, uncertainty, and regret (all the usual emotions for any transition, in other words). I also stumbled upon a blog entry by a friend whom I'm guessing some of you may know, which deals with all the same emotions, except coming from someone who's been in Germany for about a year. I'd also recommend the rest of her blog, if you have some time to burn- she's a good writer and has had some interesting experiences.

Anyways;

The specter of my departure is looming large, and I'm starting to take mental stock of what this past year has meant for me in general, where I succeeded, where I failed, and how I feel about moving on.

One thing that will ease my departure is something I've noticed more and more since coming here. Hillary Clinton spoke of a "glass ceiling" during her presidential bid, metaphorically blocking women from achieving positions of prominence and power equal to those of men. In Japan, there is a glass ceiling for foreigners, which prevents them from ever reaching positions on par with those of the Japanese with whom they work. Unlike with Hillary, however, there's also what I can only describe as a glass wall; a frigid gap between a foreigner and native Japanese that is very difficult to bridge- I'm honestly not sure whether I have or not, although I think I may getting there with some of my younger elementary school teachers. It is an unfortunate reality, however, that the majority of ALTs I know do not spend much, if any, time with close Japanese friends. The Japanese network of relationships runs lambent over every surface around me, but I can never actually seem to grasp it.

The official JET materials forecast this kind of Mime's-box difficulty, and have a number of recommendations for what one can do to improve one's situation. However, it seems to me like the implicit assumption in those materials is that if you aren't getting along with people, you've screwed up somehow. While it's true that making a concerted effort can massively improve one's social experience here, I don't feel like individual initiative is the whole story here: Japanese culture, as fascinating and beautiful as it is, has a long-running xenophobic streak. When I started working on this post, I thought I would put down some of the history to back up this statement in this post, but then realized that it would make for a rather ponderous read (more so than it is already becoming). Rather- here are some links to pertinent articles:


Sakoku

Kanagawa Treaty
Racial Issues in Japan
Koreans in Japan
Ainu History
Burakumin
Little Black Sambo
Gaijin

Reading things like this, as well as my a couple of my own experiences:

Being excoriated by a racist man for the better part of 30 minutes during the matsuri in Iwafune,

and

Having a 5th grader point at the picture I'd put up of a Papua New Guinean child on the slide projector and say "monkey," while the teacher did nothing about it (I didn't quite catch his face, or else I would have disciplined him pretty harshly).

Finally, being stared at all the time, and always treated either as a special novelty, or a special problem, but never a normal manifestation of either, becomes more burdensome with the passage of time. Not less. This kind of ethnic "specialness" has gotten exhausting enough that I'm ready to escape into the dark, comforting arms of anonymity back in America, where I don't stick out like a Giraffe in a rabbit warren.

That's the bad part.

________________________

I'm also very sad to leave, however, particularly my elementary schools. These schools that I so dreaded upon my arrival have proved to be the sites of some of the most fun and rewarding work I've ever done. Contrary to the dreary picture I just painted above, the staff are almost entirely wonderful people. Among the teachers at my shogakko, I now feel very comfortable and at-home, chatting about a number of things in between and after classes, and pulling them into the English lessons with their students.

It's the students, however, that I'll be more sad to leave than anything. Nothing I've seen here, however ancient or exotic, can compare to how rewarding it has been to get to know the kids that I work with, and to establish actual relationships of trust and love such as one only can with young children. It's difficult to put into words, in any meaningful way, the difference that these relationships have made for me (and I hope for the children, too). English doesn't want for negative descriptors, but trying to describe the positive gravitas that a good relationship with a child (or many children) can exert on oneself would require either great poetry or great narrative, neither of which I am capable of conjuring in the middle of this post. Suffice to say- the effects of getting to know the children with whom I work have been only as overwhelming as they have been positive.

Prior to coming here, I never quite understood people that "love children." My understanding now is that you don't really love children- children just love you with such ebullient energy that it is impossible not to reciprocate.

________________________

And so, once all the dross has run off, what remains is relationships. Some of my most stressful times in Japan, and most rewarding, have been the result of how I've interacted (or not interacted) with people here. I think that severing the old set, and moving back to a combination of an older set and a new set, is what is generating the most distress for me right now. I'll be very pleased if I managed to navigate the transition with something resembling grace. Finding a job other than something like poop shoveler or rock scrubber also wouldn't hurt.

So endeth my June 1st introspective post. Thanks for indulging me a little bit in a break from the regular program of photos and information about Japan. Such as I have the time, I will be posting some general photos of Niigata in Spring that defy event-specific categorization. I'm also doing some research for a post about Buddhism in Japan, such as I've encountered it, and hopefully that too will ripen enough to be put on the vine for you all (sometimes you have to yank a metaphor inside out to fit it onto the internet).

Thanks for reading!
otsukarasamadeshita.