cold cold cold

Memories of warmer times: The Kumano pilgrimage road in early Autumn.

Today I will use this blog as a forum to practice one of the most important staples of social interaction here in Japan (or anywhere, for that matter): Complaining about the weather. From the from the atsui, na? ("hot, isn't it?") of summer to the samui, na? ("cold, isn't it?") of winter, at least half of all polite conversation here in Arida begins with some sort of sympathetic bemoaning of the sadistic weather gods.  While the temperature here in Wakayama rarely dips beneath freezing, several factors contribute to making winters here frigid and miserable.

1)For some unfathomable reason, few Japanese apartments have decent insulation, so any heat built within a living room soon dissipates. A friend from Hawai'i recently discovered the source of a persistent draft in her apartment: After checking every conceivable window and door opening, she was shocked to feel a faint but unmistakable winter breeze coming though her wall.  

2) Neither home nor school has central heating. Presumably this stems from a desire to conserve resources on a crowded archipelago, a worthy goal, I must admit. It also has the side benefit of building a certain camaraderie in suffering, in those millions of cups of hot tea, coffee, and cocoa offered in solidarity to shivering coworkers.

3) The wind. Arida, like many Japanese towns, lies on the Pacific Ocean. Cold landward winds buffet the town at all hours, at times so strong that peddling at anything less than full force will only keep one's bike in place, leaving rider with a comical and confused look of exertion on his face.

In response to this state of affairs, there are two schools of thought. The first, advocated by my neighbor T, entails puttering around one's apartment in full winter wear, warmed only by the thought of yen accumulating in his bank account, unmolested by seasonal heating bills. The second entails sitting beneath air conditioner or kotatsu, worshipping these sources of electronic warmth with monthly offerings of hard-earned cash. (A kotatsu, by the way, is a low table equipped with a small heat lamp and and bedecked with an oversized blanket - the traditional Japanese solution to blustery winter days.) I've attempted to split the difference between the two, bundling up in sweatshirts and setting the AC to the lowest warm setting possible for minutes at a time.

Behind my shattering teeth, I comfort myself with the thought that my shivering somehow brings me closer to nature, that there is perhaps something unnatural about the excessive warmth of my Amherst College dorms in the depths of winter (which led many student to open windows to let heat out). Bears hibernate, amphibians even freeze through - winter is a time to conserve motion and heat. Perhaps one should shiver a bit in winter in humble acknowledgment of elemental forces greater than ourselves. With that in mind, I now click off my AC and put another cup of water on for tea...

Happy belated new year, folks

Happy new year from Riblet, the handsomest dog in the world. 

8000 miles and 26 hours later, I'm back in Arida after and all-too-brief jaunt back to the US of A. Naturally, the jet-lag has left me too discombobulated to even think about writing a full post right now, so I'll let the pictures do most of the talking.

Krispy Kreme invades Osaka, takes no prisoners.  

 Disembodied sushi hand (also Osaka, of course.)

Unfortunately, I neglected to take pictures for almost the entirety of my two-week stay in the States. I was inspired, however, to finally take my camera out of its case at the Sackler Gallery (which, along with the Freer next door, is one of the best, most underrated museums in DC).  The last paragraph is in the picture below is a quote from the 10th-century Persian epic Shahnama, several centuries-old editions of which were on exhibit at the gallery. These words seem as auspicious as any to contemplate at the beginning of the new year:  

For those who have a tough time reading the small, yellow print: 

"There is nothing in the world so terrible and fearful as the fact that one comes like the wind and departs as a breath... Whether you are a king or a pauper you will discover no rhyme or reason to it. But one must act well, with valor and chivalry, and one must eat well and rejoice: I see no other fate for you, whether you are a subject or a prince." 

May the year be one of good eating and rejoicing for us all. 

Utter Randomness

For your viewing pleasure, random fodder from my camera from the past two months: 

Ripe mikan tree just outside my junior high school. There are many many thousands of these trees in this valley. Overripe fruit rolls out into the street, into gutters, and every possible nook of the landscape here. The vice-principle at Bunsei Junior High admonished the kids at a morning assembly: "Taking mikans is shoplifting, and shoplifting is a crime!" I can hardly blame them, though - these are delicious.

One of my great loves in this country - Maximum spicyness Curry at CoCo Ichiban with spinach and cow guts.  

 The Culture Festival at Bunsei Junior High School. The banner reads: "A Culture Festival that will remain not in records, but memories." Even the tough-guy/sassy-girl third years are pretty cute when they all sing together. 

Kishu-kun: The traffic safety hound of Wakayama. 

Fresh-dried squid at a fish market in Katsuura. For when you feel like eating something that resembles a hideous space creature. 

Apparently this is actually a pretty nice hotel.... (Osaka)

The existential crisis section of the bookstore. Titles include "What am I?" "What is Death?" and "What is the Soul?". I'd post the answers, but alas, they were shrink-wrapped! Spiritual enlightenment foiled by plastic!

There are several city blocks of Osaka adorned with similar feline/pop culture themed flags. I have no clue why, but "why" is certainly besides the point here. 

God bless us, everyone!

In the coming weeks, thousands of Assistant Language Teachers across the Japanese archipelago will don Santa hats and festive sweaters for their annual Christmas lessons. I've been recruited as a Father Christmas for the morning assembly at Miyahara Elementary school next Monday, and though I worry that I'm simultaneously too tall and too skinny for their Santa suit, I am quite excited to ho-ho-ho for the wee ones.

Last week after a middle-school class, one of my Japanese co-teachers and I began chatting about the holiday season:

(In Japanese)

Carter: Did you do anything with the class last year for Christmas?

Japanese Teacher of English: Yes! We sent Christmas cards to Santa Claus. Did you know that he lives in Finland? We sent them to his address!

C: Finland? So there's be a man in Finland who pretends to be Santa... In America, we believe Santa lives at the North Pole...

JTE(matter-of-factly):  No, it's really Santa.

C: ....

JTE: We sent them to his address!

C: ....

A crush of rowdy first-years ended our conversation before I could enquire further about this mysterious Finnish St. Nick. Perhaps it's for the best that I didn't burst any bubbles that day - surely the world's a better place for every full-grown man who believes in Father Christmas.

As to be expected in a country where most people consider themselves Buddhists, Christmas in Japan is a more subdued affair than in the US of A. One still hears Christmas carols at grocery stores and spots wreathes on shop windows, but such mercantile festiveness is of a lower order of magnitude than the onslaught of "holiday cheer" back home. There are no qualms over losing sight of "the meaning of Christmas" here, no mention of baby Jesus or his manger, no "god bless us, everyone!" from Tiny Tim, no Gift of the Magi, no Grinch. Instead of eggnog, turkey, or gingerbread cookies, there's Kentucky Fried Chicken on Christmas Eve, followed by a store-bought Christmas cake.

 The more cynical among us might see this as a purer distillation of the reality of Christmas - an excuse to buy some holiday-themed stuff, devoid of any pretensions of spiritual or moral significance.

Those people can kindly choke on a fruitcake. I love Christmas.  True, I don't miss the preening celebrities churning out terrible new renditions of carols like clockwork, the consumerist frenzy that inevitably leads to someone being trampled to death at Walmart, even the idea that idea that one needs to express one's love for family through the accumulation of generally useless stuff. Nor do I miss the renewed sanctimoniousness of those who take the season as an opportunity to remind us how great baby Jesus is. But for me, Christmas remains a special time, a holiday that becomes profound precisely because it moves so far away from its religious origins. Even the most hardened cynics (when they're done choking on that fruitcake) may admit there's something wonderful about hot cocoa (or eggnog...) with relatives around a fire, or the younger generation playing in the snow, or the magical smells of christmas trees and gingerbread. There's something vital in such traditions, in the way they pull families and friends together, even if they can't stand each other most of the time. Perhaps its not much more than nostalgia, but nostalgia ranks among the more powerful emotions known to man.

Japan has no shortage of home-grown festivals, so maybe it's not such a tragedy that Christmas is a Hallmark holiday here. Even so, I'm so so so happy to be going home for the holidays :)

JLPT and Ai-chan's Place

Though you wouldn't know it from my postings, I have in fact been studying diligently for the level 1 of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT) for the past two months or so. ( as it's name implies, the JLPT's a standardized Japanese language test for non-native speakers, and level one is the top level.)  

Well, I HAD been studying hard until about two weeks ago, when a conversation with one of my JET big brothers reminded me that the test is completely optional, its results utterly inconsequential beyond "bragging rights". Nonetheless, I made the trek up to Osaka Sunday with my comrade and fellow masochist Terence to take what was essentially the verbal section of the SAT in Japanese. Bragging rights are important, right? 

The tests itself was just as interesting as, well, the original SAT. Except that the testing room was filled almost entirely with Chinese people, with a few Koreans thrown in for good measure and one dour-looking white guy in the corner. Upon reflection, I guess the demographics of the test are not all that surprising (there are a lot of Chinese people, and we are in East Asia...).  

The results of this optional, inconsequential test won't arrive until February. Even so, I feel a palpable sense of relief very very similar to what I used to feel back at Amherst after finishing the final exam before the long winter break. I suppose I remain a college boy at heart, and that the JLPT gave me that familiar sense of purpose (and low-level background stress) that I've become so accustomed to. It allowed me to postpone that great, somewhat scary sense of freedom that accompanies a life without deadlines. Many of my fellow recent college graduates will know what I'm talking about. One becomes accustomed to certain certainties after nearly two decades of schooling - a constant stream of assignments during the school year, a sense of the finiteness of breaks at Christmas, spring, and summer. Even for the hard decisions like if/when/where to go to college, I had a limited number of options arrayed before me and a definite sense of the expectations of parents, teachers, peers to push me one way or another. 

And now? A great, formless future lies ahead, one that (for the time being at least) offers very little in the way of guidance or pressure to choose one path ahead or another. It's liberating, invigorating, full of inchoate possibility, but I understand how it could also lead to ennui... ennui, of course, is a luxury of the idle and well-off...  

But enough of such tedious foolishness. It's time to head over to Ai-chan's place....  

 Ai-chan is the lovely lady on the left in this picture. She's the mama-san of an eponymous bar in Osaka's Namba district, which she has decked out in the memorabilia of Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, James Dean, and other stars and starlets of Hollywood's more glorious past. Plump, sequined, and a little surly, Ai-chan offers an unbeatable all-u-can eat/drink/karaoke special for the equivalent of about $30, whipping up tasty treats like clam pasta and kimchee pork behind the bar. 

As fortune had it, my friends from the MY WAY event (see post below), were having a get-together the very same day as the JPLT. Jill-chan, one of MY WAY's masterminds, led us to Ai-chan's place through the throngs of Namba, ever-crowded even on a Sunday night. 

Ai-chan maintains a fabulous costume collection in her establishment, and she proceeded to pass around outfits to our group after the first course. In my lap she dropped a polka-dot skirt and light-up Minny-mouse ears with a no-nonsense "here."

There is photographic evidence of course, and with this picture I give up any dreams of running for political office:   

Yu-chan seems to inspire my most incriminating photos. 

Needless to say, it was a good night despite the inconvenience of 'work' the next day. Ah, to be young and foolish...  :) (apologies for the poor quality of the photos, as my camera did not respond well to the mood lighting ) 

giving thanks

 Japan celebrated Labor Thanksgiving day last Tuesday, another public holiday with no discernible ceremonies attached to it. I was fortunate enough to spend the day in the company of these fine folks in an old ship factory in the outskirts of Osaka dressed like a mischief-maker out of Alice in Wonderland.

MY WAY: A fashion show/performance piece organized by my friend Yu (standing beside me --->) and her compatriots as part of an all-day event of art, performance and music under the auspices of ONDO, an experimental music group out of Osaka.

How does a mild-mannered American like myself end up at such an event? The tale is long, with a few twists and turns, but here's the short version: Yu, who I met last summer, recruited me to model the clothes of one of her friends at MY WAY. (A talented artist herself, Yu also made her own outfit complete with headdress)

The venue

Alas, I didn't have much time for photographs during the event itself, but suffice to say that it involved purpose-made techno music, a large number of water-filled plastic bags, live painting, toilet paper-tossing, skipping, dancing, and general mayhem. I followed my instructions ("hmmm..... act like a dandy!"), honed over weeks of practice, by prancing around the scene and striking dramatic poses as if I were a 17th-century European princeling having my portrait taken.  

Needless to say, it was loads of fun. 

I witnessed many interesting/bizarre performances that day during lulls in preparation: A dance troupe flailing as if tossed about by a typhoon, a kimono-clad woman writhing on an oversized freshly painted scroll, a lively 3-piece punk band, and of course, the hosts themselves, ONDO. To their pulsing techno beats the lead singer added guttural chants and high pitched yelps, distributing drumsticks to the audience and inviting us to bash the cymbals strategically placed throughout the room to our hearts' content. Discordant, yes, but very, very danceable :)

As I write this, many of you in America are probably waking up to the real Thanksgiving. Christmas, with its potent blend of yuletide cheer and orgiastic consumerism, will always be king of the holidays. For me, though, Thanksgiving holds many of the warmest memories -  easy, chat-filled hours of vegetable cutting and pie-filling in my Uncle Roland's kitchen, the gut-busting gloriousness of the meal itself, the warm, pleasant stupor that follows. The idea of giving thanks, of appreciating the bounty of relationships as well as material wealth we are all blessed with, also appeals to me deeply despite my equally deep agnosticism. 

With that in mind, let me give thanks. For the fortunate accident of material bounty, yes, but far more so for the interpersonal wealth I've been blessed with all my life, For my large, loving, almost comically diverse family, of course. But also for friends and lovers met in far-flung places like Maryland and Massachusetts, Hawai'i and Japan. For those ties that endure through the years, and for the serendipity of bonds freshly formed. 

This last point brings me back to MY WAY, to my new friends who dressed me in tights and welcomed me with warmth and humor despite my clumsy Japanese and clumsier modeling gait.  Thanks to them, Tuesday became for me an occasion to marvel at the small mysteries of human togetherness. So has tonight :)

From recent reading, apropos of nothing in particular:

"Reality can have metaphorical content; that does not make it less real."

 -Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children