The Time Has Come...

...with all due respect to Lewis Carrol, to Speak of Many Things (even if I have to get by without a walrus).

I took two hours out of my increasingly insane life to pay a dinner visit to the home of Togashi-sensei, a teacher from my (now former) middle school who can cook very, very well. She is also a gifted creator quilts, which lose some of their luster in photographs, so you'll just have to take my word for it. In addition to these things, she is afflicted with what John McCutcheon would call "terminal niceness," and I spent an agreeable two hours chatting with her and her daughter (one of my middle school students) over a delicious meal that included corn, salad, stewed meat and potatoes, and a miso soup with whale meat in it. The whale meat was sort of spongy, and ethics aside I don't think I would particularly seek it out to cook with on the basis of flavor alone.

At the same time, I've been trying to tally the value of my experience here in terms of what it's done for me personally- learning to be more independent, learning Japanese, new found teaching abilities, etc. This kind of accomplishment list-making only operates on a primitive level- helping me to feel satisfied as I cope with the pain of leaving. It's the kind of feeling that wouldn't feel out of place in an effort to coax a woman into my cave to start a bearskin-clad brood, or perhaps to go charging off into the brush with machete in hand. It is the other end of the adventure experience.

The visit, however, was a reminder of the kind of pleasure that's derived from non-adventurously rooting oneself in a place and building relationships there. My whole stay here in Japan has seemed fairly ephemeral, and I never felt like I really put down roots (perhaps one cannot in only a year). Getting together with some of my teachers for what may well be the last time has made me wish for the stabilizing comfort of a real social network.


Ruminations aside, a lot has happened since my last post (as it seems wont to do), so here's what else is new:


This last weekend some friends and I took a day trip to a small, pretty town called Yahiko. Like most places in Japan, Yahiko has a rich history dating back to who-knows-when, but unlike most places in Japan some very wise people decided to check the frenzy of modernizing development anywhere that it would destroy the town's charm. While there were some ugly Stalin's-cube-looking structures, most of the town was built traditionally of wood with ceramic tile roofs.

We spent the walking around, buying food, seeing the local shrine (which was quite impressive, and judging from the crests on the eves, connected to the Emperial family somehow), and riding the cable-car to the top of a nearby mountain. In the interest of brevity, I won't post any photos of all that. It was nice, but not spectacular. The interesting bit came later on, when we went to the local onsen, or hot-spring fed baths. The reason this onsen was so interesting wasn't that it was particularly nice (although it was just fine as far as that goes), but that it was completely empty except for me. This gave me an opportunity to actually take some pics inside the baths without capturing the hordes of naked Japanese men that are usually in there as well.

These are the wicker baskets that you deposit your effects in before you bathe. There are lockers available as well, although the odds of anyone actually stealing something from a public bath are pretty minimal. The floor is covered in traditional tatami straw mats, which apparently can hold up to all the moisture somehow. The one in my apartment got moldy after being wet for a very short time, but all the onsen have them and they appear to be just fine.



This is a view of the main bath area. The stools arrayed against the back wall are individual bathing areas, where you sit down and basically take a Western shower to make yourself clean enough to enter thee communal hot spring. The tub itself is heated to about 50 degrees Celsius, or about 125 degrees Fahrenheit, and has mineral treatments in the water. Being able to sit for a long time in one of these takes some practice and discipline, but the pay-off in terms of skin health is tremendous.



Also not pictured (mostly because I was afraid of getting caught) is an outdoor natural water pool, that is fed directly from the volcanic hot spring. This particular pool happened to have a basic pH, but acidic sulfur springs are actually more common. Usually the tiles around the natural spring are encrusted with mineral deposits, and the tiles on the bottom are stained different colors depending on their proximity to the spring-water nozzle.

I hope you found the very brief tour of Japanese baths to be interesting...interesting or not, they are one of the things I will miss the most about this country. You leave an onsen feeling completely clean (as well you might- the sulfur kills everything living on your skin), as well as revived.


The last bit of news which I've also seen spots about in the Western media is that the biggest eclipse of the century occurred today in Asia, and I was able to catch the tail end of it:



For those interested, it also made Japanese Google's icon for today.
The Sun was never totally eclipsed here- that only happened farther south. I almost didn't notice the eclipse because it was cloudy today, as it is more or less every day in Niigata, so I didn't attribute the darkening to anything other than the cloud-cover. On a related note- Niigata was actually slated as a potential target for the nuclear bomb, but was spared by the fact that the clouds were so consistent and opaque that the bombers wouldn't be able to confirm the target. Happy though this is, I find it galling that people drive around here sporting "sunny Niigata" bumper stickers without any apparent sense of irony.

That's it for tonight. Tomorrow, I say farewell to my last batch of students (which I'm sure will be a rather trying experience), which will mark the end of my linkage to the schools in Arakawa. From there on out, it's just a matter of crunching all the necessary bureaucracy to make a clean getaway. This may be the last post before I post again mid-vacation about Kyoto and Hiroshima (if I'm able to find internet, that is). Thanks for reading, and stay genki!

Post #84 (a long post in three parts)

~Part 1~

Not that I've been sequentially numbering my posts up until this point, but just to provide a little reference, here is post #84! I was hoping that over the course of the stay here I would make it to the more auspicious number of 100 posts, but that looks unlikely now. I suppose we can't have everything...

This post will need to cover quite a bit of ground, as I have been doing a lot of things, and don't have much time to write them down anymore. First and foremost- Murakami had its annual taisai (another way of saying matsuri), which I attended with a friend.

The first thing anyone notices at any matsuri is the lines of colorful vendor's stalls swarming with festively-clad Japanese people, like so:(Please excuse the crummy photos taken at ISO 800...it was the only way I could take anything like snapshots at night)



Matsuri food is basically like carnival food in any culture, as far as I can tell (fatty and sugary), but with all the usual Japanese twists. This is a yakitori (roast chicken, usually on a spit) stand, complete with towel-wearing bird-roaster and a red chouchin (bamboo lantern) advertising itself:



The day after the stalls set up, the festival gets going in earnest. Before we could make it to the actual matsuri, however, I was obliged to take a picture of this car that we saw:



The Murakami Taisai is an ancient and relatively famous matsuri, as far as these things go. For one thing, it gets its own Wikipedia page like so(Japanese only), also has the unique defining characteristic of oshagiri (お囃子), which are basically massive two-wheeled carts about two stories high. It also has the privilege of getting its own special Asahi-brand beer cans around this time of year. The oshigiri are also very difficult to find information about, because (as I ultimately discovered), they are only used at the matsuri in Murakami. They are lined up before the festivities officially start like so:



Each pulling team wears their own distinct happi (each cart belongs to a certain district of Murakami), and having consumed copious amounts of booze, grabs onto a huge rope attached to the front of the oshagiri and starts to pull it forward a bit. The teams take frequent breaks, however, in order to drink more beer and sing traditional songs.

The oshagiri themselves have quite a history, dating back to the Edo Period, so anywhere from 250 to 400 years old. We could hear the old wood groaning as we pulled them around. I have also decided to post a detail from one of them; all of the oshagiri were lavishly decorated with beautiful carvings, but I thought that this bird was as interesting as any:



Here is a young girl in a yukata peering at the foreigners. Women from very young girls to Grandmothers all like to get done up in a nice yukata for festivals.



This is a close-up of one of the oshagiri in motion. The children (more girls than boys, for whatever reason) ride inside and play instruments as they lumber along.



Finally, here is a photo of me and two friends in our Kamachi (that's the name of the district whose oshagiri we helped pull) orange happi. The man is the owner and chef at a french-style restaurant called Fuji (for some reason...), and is overall just a wonderful person. The woman is Flo, whom you have met before.



Also, it's amazing who/what all you'll encounter in Murakami if you know the right people. Specifically, we briefly had a meal and a few cups of sake with none other than the supreme commander of all of Japan's military forces. He didn't stay long after we got there, but on the way out everyone got back into seiza (the proper way of sitting), and bowed almost to the floor for him. To provide some reference- you only seiza and deep bow if a) you are meeting someone very important or b) apologizing for something fairly intense...on the order of running over and then grilling your neighbor's cat, for instance. As it was, we didn't say much to each other (although he has been to Rhode Island, apparently), but I did get to sit in his "presence," which was an interesting experience. I'm not sure how to rank it on my scale of experiences (being a pacifist makes this kind of thing a little awkward), but the rarity of the opportunity made it interesting all by itself.

~end post 84, Part 1~




Part 2:

Pachinko. Pachinko is the gambling game of choice in Japan, and is especially prominent in more economically depressed rural areas (like Niigata!). Basically, you feed 1,000 yen (about $10) into a slot, and receive hundreds of little ball bearings. You then feed these balls into a machine, and attempt to drop them in a target hole. Should you succeed, this then begins the slot machine, which may or may not actually pay out. I decided that I had to try it at least one time before I left Japan, so I went to the "Balian Resort" in Shibata to give it a go. Here is the outside of the parlor:



As a rule, Pachinko parlors deck themselves out in the most blaring, vision-assaulting ornamentation that they can, and tend to make cities like New Orleans looks downright Romanesque. To cap off the effect, this one had glowing red palm trees outside that even put the ones at the Oasis on the Planes to shame (for you I-70 driving readers):



Here is the interior- row upon row of pachinko machines. What you cannot get from the photograph is the sheer noise- each machine emits a cacophony of jingling bells and anime sound bytes, with loud background music played over the top of it all. I apologize for the photo quality, but I think that photography wasn't technically allowed...so I had to be sneaky about it:



Here is a pachinko machine interface. Each machine is typically themed for a certain anime series- Neon Genesis Evangelion is far and away the most popular, but I also got to try something with some definite 70's beats and muttonchops going on, as well as the one pictured below:



That's one other thing about Japan: the total homogeneity in all aspects of life of commercial franchises. Whereas in America it would be sacrilegious to take a beloved cartoon and prostitute it out to sell gambling, food, alcohol, school supplies, clothes, and even condoms (although Disney's doing their darndest), here there the brand is splashed all over everything and it doesn't seem to bother anyone. I still find it alarming, cross-cultural-ness aside, because I think that over-commercializing everything is a destructive trend in any culture, but Japan is hardly anything if not whole-heartedly commercial...so there you go.


~end Post 84, Part 2~



Part 3:


Flo and I decided that it would be nice to go visit the Volcanic crater at Zaou for a short day trip. I always found the lack of fiery, destructive potential in the mountains that I've previously lived near to be rather disappointing, that for all their grandeur, the Rockies are just fire-less wrinkles. The Appalachians were even more disappointing, in that they were wrinkles which had passed their prime. In Japan, on the other hand, I am not even sure that it is possible to be more than 50 kilometers from a Volcano or Volcanic formation, and Zaou is one of the more spectacular ones near Arakawa.

On the way up into the mountains, the Arakawa was covered in a creeping layer of mist, which I thought was interesting enough to stop and photograph (after stumbling through a thick patch of spider-infested weeds by the river's edge):



Here is a picture of the okama, or caldera:



The landscape was still blasted and rocky, and not just due to the altitude (higher surrounding slopes had trees growing on them). I suspect that it had as much to do with the toxicity of the soil as with the rockiness- all the bands of colors in the rock (as well as the violent turquoise color of the crater lake) testified to the presence of of a number of nasty oxides of various metals.

The final photo from Zaou is of a cloud-enshrouded shrine atop a nearby ridge, which is covered with snow for about half of the year:



Finally, to end on a nice Japan-y note, here are a pair of torii lit by the sunset on top of the Castle Mountain in Murakami.



~end Post #84, Part 3~


Coda:

The madness of departure has reached a sort of fever pitch here, and my life has become something of a nightmare haze of packing, filling out forms, and talking to rather panicked-looking clerks about canceling various services. I'll try to keep posting as I can, but I'm not sure when I'll have that time. Thanks for reading, and keep checking back in case I get something up in the as-yet uncertain future!