Not Just Ninjas

Oh, and did I mention that I just, much to my surprise, passed my Level 3 Japanese Proficiency Test?

Woohoo!

Last spring, we travelled to the nearest Big City, Sendai, for a Beck concert. During that trip we skipped over to the famous sightseeing destination Matsushima. While there, Steph snapped this moving shot of a Shinto procession carrying a shrine down the street:

Imagine our surprise when a few weeks ago, out of the blue, a gentleman named Maarten Reith from the Netherlands contacted us through our Flickr account. The Dutch city of Arnhem is playing host to an international sculpture exhibition called Sonsbeek 2008 in June, and the opening ceremonies for this exhibition will involve the sculptures being hand-carried throughout the city to their final destination in a public park. Sonsbeek’s procession was inspired by religious ceremonies such as this Shinto custom, and Mr. Reith was writing a newspaper article about the exhibition.

Now, not two weeks later, the article is published and Steph is famous! The photo is almost a full page and spans the center spread of De Gelderlander newspaper of January 24, 2008. Contratulations to Stephanie!

If you live in Japan and are employed in any capacity or belong to any social groups, you will most likely spend your entire December floating from one bounenkai to another. These “forget the year” parties mostly consist of sitting in a big tatami room, flitting from table to table and filling up people’s glasses with alcohol. I was thrilled when my adult English conversation class deviated from this time-honored standard and set up a night of karaoke instead.

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There’s something really satisfying about celebrating your own holiday in a foreign country. Maybe not the ones where you usually spend time with your family, but the other ones where there’s lots of silly customs and games, those are fun. Take this Halloween, for example. Because I don’t live in the states, I am not subject to the grotesque advertising free-for-all that comes with any major holiday. I have the luxury of ignoring the commercial aspects, and celebrating if and when I want. Cut to this week’s eikaiwa class.

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Last Monday I arrived at my high school to discover with dismay that I was at the wrong school. It’s not so surprising actually. With 15 schools to visit, it’s a wonder I don’t make this mistake all the time. With one hour to regroup, I went home and began my planning for elementary school lessons. Raw ingredients for the day’s lessons included:

• my smallest school, with only 10 kids in the entire student body
• my voice, hoarse and almost inaudible, from a long and insistent cold

I racked my brain: with an hour’s notice, how could I finagle a day of successful lessons? And then it hit me: Of course! I would bring the pumpkins.

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One really great way to see your neighborhood with new eyes is to join a group which performs in your community. In this way, you get an insider’s view into all of the weird, wonderful little events that make a neighborhood a neighborhood. This is especially an eye-opener for someone living in a small town in a foreign country who has yet to master the language: namely, me.

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Some of you may have heard that we have made some inroads in the music/performance community here, after a year of looking in from the outside.

A month or two ago, our friend and fellow Noshiro ALT Frank discovered and introduced us to a taiko drumming group, Noshiro Belabo Taiko (???????). We (and I in particular) had been dithering about joining a similar group in the neighboring town of Futatsui, unaware that there was one right in our own back yard. The group is a great deal of fun, consisting in roughly equal quantities of adults and elementary/junior high kids.

After all of two rehearsals, we were informed we’d be performing at a small town festival the following weekend. Since then we’ve been in no less than three performances (albeit playing with the kids), which always tickles the announcers who love shoving microphones in our faces and asking us where we’re from.

We don’t have any taiko videos yet, so for the moment you can get an idea from this photo from our friend Andy:

Almost immediately after starting taiko, Steph fulfilled her year-long dream and got the opportunity to join a Yosakoi dance team. In the apparent tradition of Japanese performing groups, they threw her into a performance after but two rehearsals. Here they are performing (in the rain) at the pre-Futatsui Marathon festival (5-minute video; might take a minute to load):

Yosakoi at Futatsui Marathon Festival

When we moved to Noshiro, we were “thrilled” to find that our otherwise wonderful house included two ancient rusty car hulks in the front yard. You may remember them from such photographs as “Our House”:

According to Nate, Steph’s predecessor, they had been there when he’d moved in three years before.

Well, last week, a couple guys showed up at our front door and asked me if those cars were mine. “Heck no,” I said in my best Japanese, “but I can take you to the person who knows.” I showed them to our landlord who lives in one of the blue shacks next door. I left them to it and surreptitiously watched out a window as they gestured and yakked around the cars. The guys got in their souped-up spoilered window-tinted pimpmobile and went on their way.

I didn’t really expect that they would actually return for the hulks. But my lack of faith, disturbing or otherwise, was rewarded today when a crane truck backed into the driveway right up next to the cars. Open the gates, Peter, they’re a-comin’ home!

Now they are gone and a whole new world of landscaping opportunities (and parking places!) has opened before us. We might need to have a bring-your-own-car party just to see how many we can fit out there. It’s still not Andy’s driveway, but we’re catching up!

P.S. I was amused to note that a pine sapling about two feet high had grown between the cars.

Well, there’s been another water incident, only this one wasn’t confined to my high school. Last weekend some sort of typhoon passed over the great state of Akita, and we took a little bit of a beating. As it was a 3 day weekend, I missed most of the storm warnings, though I could tell something was up. As far as I knew, we just got a lot of rain, nothing special. When I arrived at school on Tuesday morning, I heard a slightly different story.

I was a bit confused when my co-teacher told me that the school was being closed because of wind. The weather outside didn’t seem so severe, and I’d been in much stronger winds in Noshiro before. My confusion escalated to alarm when I heard that the teachers were required to stay at school even though the students were sent home. Our school building is, let’s say, on the crumbly side and is currently undergoing extensive renovation. When I heard that something was dangerous enough to cancel class, but that the teachers had to stick it out, images of being buried alive in a pile of rubble flashed before my eyes.

Which is when I heard about the evacuees in the gym. And the pieces started to fall together… we weren’t bracing ourselves for wind after all. The Yoneshiro river which runs through town was full to the point of bursting, and things were starting to get wet. Things like entire rice fields and houses. I sat back and took it all in for a moment. Flood? Where was I when all this happened?

As school was technically closed for the day, I had to go out and forage for my lunch. My usually peaceful town was abustle with traffic. Restaurants were closed. Police had blockaded now-underwater river-adjacent streets. I’m told that snakes and frogs lined the retaining wall, fleeing from the swollen river as the water inched upwards. Isn’t that some kind of sign of the apocalypse?

Luckily, Noshiro and the Akita river area in general is built for this sort of thing, with wide flood plains. Nevertheless, over 25,000 people in Akita have had to evacuate their homes. Entire bridges are missing a little farther to the southeast. Let’s hope that typhoon season ends soon so we can all dry out a little.

I just wanted to post a quick follow-up to one of Steph’s posts from a few months ago.  We just salvaged the photos off Steph’s phone, going all the way back to February.  Among them were several gems from the high school festival she wrote about in July.  That would be the one with the Johnny Depp shrine and the Spider-man room.  So here they are.

http://flickr.com/photos/chrissam42/archives/date-taken/2007/06/30/detail.