Not Just Ninjas

One more post on the joys of small town life. Akita Prefecture is playing host to the 62nd Annual National Sports Festival of Japan (that’s right! the sports-playing tree mascot is not a general Akita symbol as we originally thought, but is in fact Sugitchi, the mascot for this Olympic-style sporting event). Yesterday, the city of Noshiro held a rally in the center of town to celebrate the opening of this sports festival next month.  This was a Big Event.  What looked like the entire student bodies of at least five schools filled the streets to see a torch go by.  There was music and dance-like gyrating:

Sugitchi Rally

After sitting around on sidewalks for half an hour, the actual “action” lasted for about two minutes.  The torch went by, photos were taken, and over a thousand students made their way back through the streets to their respective schools.

The Japanese school year is one of the longest in the world, at least six weeks longer than the American school year, but many of those extra days consist of festivals and field trips like this.

There’s a marathon coming up in the nearby town of Gojome. The list of prizes completely captures the feeling of small-town life. Here they are as described by Gojome JET Corey Newman:

50 people will receive a “Morning Market Pack,” which probably has all the daikon and mountain vegetables you could eat – a virtual countryside tabehoudai!

25 people will receive 720ml of sake made right here in town. Our mayor owns a sake company, and it’s pretty good stuff.

Finally, another 25 people will receive 2kg of rice.

These prizes define Gojome.

I haven’t seen the sun for a good ten days, and it’s making me a bit twitchy. In the midst of all this wet and gloom, imagine my surprise when a teacher burst into the staff room and asked me in a panic if anything was wet. One eyebrow raised, I followed her into the corridor, where drip drip dripping could be heard soaking through the ceiling onto the linoleum floor. Peering further down the hallway, I was astonished to see sheets of water pouring down flights of stairs. Leaky roof? No, a pipe had spontaneously burst on the fourth floor.

At this point, the individuals who had been milling around school aimlessly during summer vacation burst into action. Everyone manned themselves with old mops, buckets, and squeegees. Each tool by itself was pretty ineffective… old ratty mops and dustpans… but when used together in a sort of fireman’s brigade of pushing water across the floor, and into the public bathrooms, where we could trap the excess water, we were able to make progress. Water-sucking vacuums were brought in to pipe the water outside, where students gleefully turned the exhaust hose on each other.

Face to face, working with my Japanese colleague in the hall, he stopped for a moment, considered the water cascading from floor to floor down the stairwell and cheekily informed me in English: “summer festival”. Indeed.

Little did he know that he was talking to a festival whore. I will travel anywhere at anytime no matter what the distance if you whisper one little word into my ears: matsuri. This is how I was seduced into traveling about 2 hours southeast to Ani-Maeda (literally, the rice field just before the town of Ani) on a school night to see a Tanabata festival.

Tanabata is a celebration held either on July 7 or August 7, depending on where you live in Japan. This festival celebrates the one day a year when two star crossed lovers can meet, and is a time to make wishes. Each region seems to celebrate this festival in a different way. Noshiro celebrates by hauling fish-shaped floats throughout town, and burning them on the river. Akita City celebrates the season by toting huge fiery representations of rice up and down the street. Ani-Maeda celebrates Tanabata by setting everything on fire.

We arrived to find the usual complement of festival food: onigiri, yakisoba, cotton candy… and an unusual amount of ã�»ã‚‹ã‚‚ã‚“ (intestines) and 馬肉 (horsemeat). What we didn’t expect was to see our favorite chef from Noshiro… who recognized us instantly, came over to greet us warmly, and drunkenly presented us with 5 ears of cooked corn. Such are the quirks of life in the Japanese countryside.

Shortly after we were presented with the bounty of corn, a procession of floats marched past the food stalls, and wound its way down to the river front. The floats were a bit rickety, clearly handmade by local artisans. Each float was followed by a small contingent of drum and flute players, each with their own tune, so that as the floats passed you by, one rhythm would morph awkwardly into the next.

We were adopted by a group of friendly folk. Before the big show, they waved us over, and magically produced seating for all 6 of us, effectively doubling the size of their party. As the light waned, everyone sat down on one side of the river on the edge of town. Facing the opposing bank as night fell, torches lit up one by one appeared in the darkness, streaking in lines across our field of view. Moments later, fireworks burst from these strings of lights, and only then did I realize that the lines of torches created 3 volcanoes, which had all started exploding.

The festival proceeded at a leisurely pace. Between firework displays, we watched kanji slowly appear across the river in fiery strokes as all the necessary lanterns were lit by hand. A taiko group played through the night. Strings of fireworks were lit from the bridge and dripped off brilliantly into the water below.

A zip line had also been set up from a nearby hill, in order to send fiery images plummeting into the river. Skiers made of fire, a tribute to the ski area nearby, flew through the air, only to be extinguished below. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw an airplane on fire soar through the air, and extinguish itself in the river. This was supposedly a tribute to the nearby airport, which was recently completed… though I have to say I kind of got mixed messages about the safety of air travel from the display.

I’m looking forward to the few remaining weeks of festival season, when I’ll be running like a madman all over the ken, trying to catch as many events as possible before we sink from the hot sticky lethargy of summer into the crisp golden air of autumn.

Last Saturday was my school festival, which was really just “Let’s Celebrate our Unanimous and Inexplicable Love for Johnny Depp” day in disguise. This is quite possibly the best way to earn my keep for a day as an English teacher. I wandered the halls, I was seduced by tasty festival treats: cotton candy, hot dogs, and fried chicken bowls. I went from room to decorated room in a fascinated daze. They were like classroom sized dioramas of whatever struck the students’ fancy. One room was dedicated to Depp himself, and was a kind of Willy Wonka goes pirate kind of theme, complete with pirate ship, booty, candy covered walkways and golden chocolate bars. Down the hall, they were showing “Pirates of the Carribean” on a loop all day. The adjacent classroom displayed a showdown between good and evil Spiderman, with the webbed men hanging from the ceiling, strands of web streaming through the air. The final classroom recreated a very convincing Japanese shrine out of cardboard, including the huge red torii gate, the stone lions which flank shrines (here they were cute cats made out of layered styrofoam) and ema, which you could write on and hang on the wall. Other rooms were filled with class newspapers, which were painstakingly detailed by hand, with kanji characters flowing down the page, and elaborate designs behind them.

No school event (not my school, anyway) is complete without some combination of male nudity and an uncomfortable homoerotic skit. Odd but true. The boys’ baseball team jogged in in their skivvies, and kissed each other on the lips on stage so everyone could laugh at them, and began a spirited dance routine. I have no idea what that was all about, but something similar seems to happen at every school function.

Immediately after the festival, we drove as fast as possible to Akita city, where we joined several other JETs from around the ken for an honest to God baseball game, Tokyo Swallows vs. the Nagoya (Nagano?) dragons. Despite their oddly un-intimidating mascot, the Swallows kicked ass. Meanwhile, I was blissfully discovering that the snack stands contained not just yakitori and ricke crackers, but also churros! No Mexican food available for hundreds of miles, but for baseball, churros? Why? For the remainder of the evening I did what I do at every baseball game… hang out and drink beer and schmooze with my friends and watch very little of the actual sport itself.

The next day was GAIJIN SUMOOOOOOO, a yearly event we do in our prefecture for charity. Twenty-four non-Japanese English teachers volunteered to wrestle each other after a quick lesson in the finer points of sumo. We’re hard core here, so they wore naught but the traditional sumo mawashi (diaper) for the fight. This year’s fight was in an actual sumo ring, and at the end, the winner went head to head with an actual sumo fighter. It was a pretty intense and amazing event… videos of some of the fights can be seen here. There were some pretty amazing upsets, and lots of scraped up toes, backs, and buttcheeks by the end of the day. Chris would not yield to my pestering, and didn’t compete this year, but after seeing the glory that comes from battle he has promised to participate next year. Here’s a little taste of the ringside action:

We then RAN home from sumo to join my adult English conversation class for an early Fourth of July blowout on the beach. This event was masquerading as an English class event, but really it was just an excuse to cook food I have been craving for a bunch of friends. I was adamant that we have buns to go with the burgers and dogs, and adamant that these burgers be cooked on a grill, components which are all too often missing in the Japanese version. Chris mixed up some patties with a little recipe magic from mom (thanks, mom!). They were received well.

I was worried about making enough food to feed 20 people, but my eikaiwa class saved the day; piles of yakisoba, watermelon, and corn braised in soy sauce were waiting for us when we arrived (despite my protests that soy sauce for the 4th is a bit non-traditional). We made sure to adhere to watermelon-eating protocol by having a seed spitting contest. And of course, no 4th is complete without some fireworks, readily available during the summer in this wet wet country.

Amazingly enough, everyone who said they’d be there was there, including our beloved Brits (a must for the 4th, don’t you think?), and some Canadians from down south. They were kind enough to inform us that not only were we celebrating the 4th early, not only were we celebrating Claire’s birthday (July 1st), but we were also celebrating Canada Day (also July 1st. Hooray!). Lucky for us that celebrating Canada Day is an awful lot like celebrating the 4th (minus the pancake breakfast). What a nexus of celebratory goodness.

Only if you live in Tohoku are you lucky enough for cherry blossom season and Golden Week to intersect. Ever since I saw revellers sitting out in Kyoto, drinking sake under the blossoms and the stars, I’ve been awaiting my chance to do the same in Noshiro. While the blossoms are finally, finally here, the social aspect kept falling through for some reason.

Last weekend we made plans to party with my adult English class, but the weather was cold and the blossoms weren’t out yet. Tuesday, our English club at the high school was going to make a go of it after school, until two of the girls were caught shoplifting. After that incident it was considered in poor taste to go out and have fun, so the girls stayed after school to do English drills instead. I was invited to not one, but TWO tea ceremony/flower viewing parties last Thursday, but unfortunately, I caught the crud that’s been going around the high school, and I was incapacitated by a 24 hour flu.

So this weekend, with the trees in full bloom, we created our own sakura gameplan. Plan A was to wander through the park near our house, and try to get ourselves “pulled in” to an ongoing party. We arrived a bit late in the festivities, as everyone was winding things up just before sunset, but we did have some nice exchanges with these friendly construction workers, who fancied a good frolic on the swing set.

The rest of the weekend, we went chasing blooms. The most magnificent display was just to the north in Hachimori, which boasts an entire hillside covered in cherry trees. We also checked out two castle parks in the not so near Akita City, but these didn’t hold a candle to the parks closer to home.

On Monday, we were satisfied with the blossom element, but still searching out the party. We said screw it, plan B, we’re going to make our own party. So three of us, all English teachers from America, bravely trotted out to the park, plentiful goodies and alcoholic supplies underarm. No sooner did we all crack open a beer when we were swept into an adjacent party (see plan A).

We were invited to join a party of Izakaya owners and goers, which means they all frequent a particular pub ’n grub establishment in town. It also means they are very practiced at having a good time. This crew brought several dozen glass steins and a beer keg to the park! Festival food for the offering included someone’s tentacles, denuded shellfish, remarkably lifelike shrimp with all the appropriate appendages still attached. We ate hanami dango and sausages and grilled veggies. The party also included a long haired dachsund, who would run amok on the picnic blanket, spilling food and dragging food in his wake.

And now we’re off to Osaka to enjoy the rest of the long weekend. Happy Golden Week, y’all!

Here’s a brief video of Steph teaching a class on Ghanaian music last weekend. The sound seems to be a second behind the video (a problem I seem to have with all the videos I upload to YouTube), but you get the idea.

[youtube 4cYuIucnWEc]

We have long been looking forward to our first visitors from home: our college friends Nik and Vivien. Upon arriving in Japan, they spent a few days in Tokyo, where Vivien gave a talk on low-temperature physics at Tokyo University and Nik managed to finagle a business meeting with some Japanese companies. But disaster struck when a business emergency called Nik back to Los Angeles on zero notice, on the very day they were to get on the train to Noshiro.

Vivien made the best of a bad situation and hit the tracks by herself. We met her in Akita City and headed with guarded excitement to a new Mexican restaurant we had heard about mere days earlier. Imagine our surprise and somewhat resigned disappointment when we discovered that it was yet another standard (although nice) Japanese restaurant — called “Amigo Amiga” for no apparent reason. At least it had a great view!

Steph had work the next day, so I showed Vivien around town. After about three Shinto shrines it hit home that there really isn’t much to show a guest around here. We swung by Steph’s high school for an impromptu school tour: “This is our computer lab. This is our other computer lab. This is the staff room.” We met the principal and received some neat little cookies with the school’s emblem branded on them. Vivien kept hers as souvenirs, but I was foolish enough to try one. They tasted like sand, with maybe a few grains of sugar mixed in. I decided to keep my second one as a souvenir too.

Thursday was a more exciting day for Vivien. Steph was scheduled at an elementary school, which is fun because the kids are young enough not to have had the life beaten out of them by Japanese conformity, and since she only visits each elementary school a couple times a year, it’s a big event for them. Vivien got to serve as assistant-assitant language teacher for the day.

Since we were missing Second Friday this month due to our Sapporo trip, we gathered all our gaijin friends for a Thursday night outing instead. After all, Vivien’s visit wouldn’t be complete without a night of grub, grog, purikura and song. After some skepticism, Vivien succumbed to the allures of karaoke, and I must say our duet on Gangsta’s Paradise was an event to remember.

Friday morning it was train time again, as Vivien and I headed for Sapporo. Steph and the gang joined us Saturday morning after their overnight ferry right from Akita. Steph’s already covered that, so I will simply leave you with a few pictures from Viv’s visit. Thanks for being our first guest, Vivien! We hope you can come back sometime, perhaps when it’s warmer, with Nik.

Bonanza! I got photos from Claire‘s and Frank‘s cameras and have added them to the Sapporo set. If you’ve already looked at our Sapporo photos, look again! You’ll see more photos of Vivien, us, and the whole group.

I had elementary school visits for the last two weeks, which means the inevitable… I’m sick again. Although it’s doing wonders for my conversational Japanese. Here is what I’m getting really good at saying:

• I became sick.
• Yes, I have a cough. I’m sorry that I’m loud!
• No, I don’t have a fever.
• Yes, I’m taking medicine.
• Slowly, slowly I am getting better.

Being sick for like the 4th time this winter, I have been disinclined to blog lately. But this didn’t stop me from going to the mother of all Japanese festivals… The Sapporo Snow Festival. Dun-dun!!!!!

Vivien the unflappable joined us in Noshiro for the few days preceding the festival. This must have been tiresome for her, but we tried to spice it up a little by dragging her to a few tasty restaurants and an elementary school, as well as introducing her to the boredom banishing joys of purikura and karaoke.

As for the festival… this year was kind of a great and kind of a terrible year to go. Great because the timing was such that the festival culminated on a 3 day weekend. This is essential for anyone traveling from Akita who wants to spend more than a day in Sapporo. The logistics of the trip are a little insane… 7-9 hours by train, and around $150 each way, but hey, this is a once-in-a-lifetimer, right? On the other hand, it’s a not such a good year to go because, well, it’s the warmest winter in Japan in like 100 years, which has turned visions of grand icy vistas to slush.

Viv and Chris took off early on Friday, since they’re not chained to the Japanese school system as I am. I left later with a flock of JETs… we drove an hour to Akita City, then took a 9 hour red-eye ferry, followed by a bus to the train to the subway, finally arriving in Sapporo at 8am on Saturday with 3 solid hours of sleep. I have to say, if you’re thinking about taking the ferry in Japan, go for it, cause it’s super cheap (comparatively… unless you have one of those super amazing gaijin train passes, in which case, never-mind) and SWANKY! This boat was totally decked out with an outdoor hot tub (sadly, not in service in the winter), a pub, cafe, restaurant, video-game room, and movie theatre. Also included were some of the most awesome food vending machines I have ever seen. One spit out ice cream, for those in need of immediate gratification. Another would produce your choice of karaage or onigiri, providing you had a few minutes to wait for the manufacture of hot food. Also awesomely present was a “sports” room, which consisted of two ping pong tables, only one of which had a net. Let me repeat that so it can sink in: a boat with ping pong. Seriously, how great is that?

We made up an elaborate set of rules that allowed all 4 of us to play at once with only 2 paddles. I believe the other two people made do with a cell phone and a hair brush. Rules included spontaneous verbal commands, including “llama” (switch tables), “eagle” (aim for the ceiling), and “tiger” (aim for your friend). It all smacked a little of Calvinball, and produced not a few sidelong glances from our fellow passengers.

So! Sapporo! Full of great restaurants, parks, and temples, all on an orderly and not-so-Japanese grid system, along with extensive underground tunnels, shops, and stores to duck the harsh winter. Fabulous city, just fabulous. Except, this year, for the lack of snow. Kind of a disappointment when you go to a snow festival, eh? I’m not a very hearty winter soul, so I was happy enough with the weather, which hovered around freezing, and got to -5 Celsius at its coldest. It snowed just enough to be atmospheric. Apparently, earlier in the week when folks were making the snow sculptures, it was too warm, and snowy appendages were falling off left and right (the horror!), but the cold returned just in time to rejuvenate the sculptures for the hoards of incoming tourists.

Pretty much what you do for a snow festival is walk around and look at stuff between snacks. We sampled the gamut of Sapporo’s festival food: corn, potatoes (these mysteriously were covered in powdered sugar), amazingly delicious frankfurters, condensed milk crepes, pork buns, and chocolate covered bananas. The snow sculptures were of course the main attraction. The sizes ranged from person-sized to larger-than-your-house. All sorts of snowy gimmicks were employed, including a sculpture with fish frozen in it, and all manner of blinking and colored lights. Performers took to the snow stage at night, ranging from hard core heavy metal to cuter than cute J-pop.

Though we were severely sleep deprived, we took a whirlwind tour of everything the wintery city had to offer. In rapid succession, we ate the famed Genghis Kahn at the Sapporo Brewery, followed by a tour of their museum. How fun is it to see old pics of Japanese brewing masters with vests and handlebar mustaches? We also liked the wall of advertising, showing geisha after geisha from multiple eras with a nice tall frosty pitcher of beer.

Then it was off to the Ishiya chocolate factory, which produces Sapporo’s famous white chocolate delights. We made it there just in time to see the slightly sinister and overly happy on the hour clock display, which lasted for a good 10 minutes, and involved singing dogs, gophers, pigs, and chocolate chefs. After a quick cake and coffee and sled down the kiddie snow hill, we hit the third museum of the day, tried to learn about sake. Really we just ended up taste-testing, as it was more of a one room store with pictures than a museum.

Phew. Exhausting. With that we had to go and eat a very speedy (but utterly delectable) ramen meal before sending Vivien on her way home by train. If you go to Sapporo, it is mandated that you try their ramen. I don’t care how hot the weather is. I don’t care if you think all ramen tastes the same. You’d be wrong, and you shall kick yourself a thousand times over if you don’t sample the liquidy noodle-tastic delight that is butter-corn ramen. If you can find it, patronize MOGURA (ã‚‚ã��ら). It’s on the southeast corner of the big central intersection of the Susukino nightlife district, just a few doors down from the subway station entrance. It’s the ramen shop with filled to the gills with equal parts steam and local character, with the lady at the door telling anyone who will listen, “Doozo. Oishii, yo!!!”

Of course, with evening came the illumination of all the snow sculptures, so we had to go see them again, taking goofy thematic pictures with as many as possible. At night, the ice bars also open for business, which are pretty fun to try… bartenders pouring whatever you just ordered down an ice slide to chill your beverage of choice. Or there was the “carve your own shot glass out of ice” booth. Or you could be boring but happy like me and get some hot Bailey’s to warm you to the tips of your toes.

I scored a Wii! And just in time for Nik and Viv to visit.