Not Just Ninjas

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!

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.

(more…)

I didn’t hear about the southern-California wildfires until my mom told me about them on the phone yesterday. Since then I’ve been riveted by the Flickr community’s photos that are constantly being uploaded by photographers all over the region.

You can get an idea of the scale of this thing from this map from KPBS.

The amazing thing is that this map covers as much area as the entire prefecture that we live in in Japan.

It’s deja vu all over again. We lived in San Diego for four years before moving to Japan, and the fire pictures are taking us back to 2003 when some of the same areas burned at almost exactly the same dates, starting on October 26 and continuing for several days after.

Our thoughts are with our friends in San Diego, particularly John and Kathie who live directly between the north and south fires.

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

Pumpkins and Potatoes

I’ve been coaching a high school student for a speech contest (which she won, incidentally). She was really nervous the day before the contest. To calm her nerves, another teacher suggested that she imagine that everyone in the audience was a potato or a pumpkin. This advice, “Minna wa jagaimo”, is apparently de rigeur when trying to calm public speakers. I told my co-teacher that our old stand-by is to imagine everyone in the audience in their underwear. I don’t think this American version was translated for my student’s benefit.

The Big Chill

I’ve been doing mini-lessons on Halloween, explaining why we wear costumes, and why we make Jack O’Lanterns. During one of these lessons, I learned people go to haunted houses in Japan also, though it is a summer activity, because being scared cools the body.  I can see a certain logic there, I suppose, but autumn will always be haunted house time for me.

Piping Hot

Many of the onsens around Akita are located in mountainous areas. These ups and downs can be really hazardous to negotiate in the winter with ice on the road. However, wintertime is exactly when you want to take a nice long dip on an onsen. The solution? Pipe onsen water under the roads to keep them ice free. Efficient and brilliant. Here’s a cross section of road with all the tubes for water:

Oishii, yo!

While driving through the ken, we stumbled onto a little pullout by the side of the road, which was absolutely brimming with trucks. We pulled over to see what the hubbub was about, and found people enthusiastically filling huge jugs with the water pouring out of a pipe from the mountain. Empty bottles were provided nearby for a small fee. People were hauling away this water by the truckload. Apparently this particular source of water was praised by some writer, and ever since, people have flocked to this spot. With assurances of “oishii, yo!”, I filled up one of my own bottles for a sample. I must not have a very sensitive palate, because I tasted nothing. Or perhaps that is the very embodiment of delicious water.

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.

I discovered this delightful public-service announcement posted over the urinals in the bathroom of a visitor center on the slopes of Mount Chokai in the south end of Akita. It says “please take one more step forward.” Or in the words of our friend Andy: “You’re not as close as you think you are.”

We passed this wonderful advertisement (?) in the city of Sakata, Yamagata.  Unfortunately the building it was attached to was closed, so we never got to try this mysterious “blue soup”.

The text says “Kyuusai Blue Soup” and the speech bubbles above the guy’s head say “one more cup!” and “tastes terrible.”  We never figured out if this was an actual product or just an elaborate joke.

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. 

Clothes shopping can be a hit-and-miss affair in Japan, a country where most people are the size and shape of popsicle sticks. And, of course, Japanese fashion is famously strange at the best of times. Enter UNIQLO. UNIQLO is Japan’s version of The Gap, and Steph and I have had pretty good luck finding clothes there.

Japan is a madly seasonal country, and clothing stores are no exception. If you see a shirt or a flavor of ice cream you like, you’d better buy it now because they might not have it next week. The upside of this is that it’s always fun just to drop in and see what fun novelty T-shirts they’ve got today. American baseball team shirts are popular, and there are always a lot of random campy print T-shirts in styles from old-west to 1970s.

The funny thing about random events is that they inevitably make occasional uncanny patterns and you never expect it. Thus I was surprised when, while waiting for Steph to try on some clothes, I stumbled upon a whole series of shirts about… fonts. The first one that caught my said (backwards) “Character Set Calligraphy Bitmap”. I looked below it and saw another: “METAFONT”. I kept looking and the typographical joy kept flowing: “OPENTYPE” “sans-serif” “ASCENDER”. These shirts are all produced by T-26, a font foundry whose fonts we sell at MyFonts and, in fact, whose shirts Steph has bought for me before.

Steph prevented my from buying the whole set, but I did walk out with two.

But the story does not end there. No more than a couple weeks later, we walked into another UNIQLO store, and there in the window was a Seattle landmark from my youth. Unable to believe the coincidences with my own life that UNIQLO was throwing at me, I walked out the proud owner of a new Pink Elephant Car Wash shirt.

For those of you who are curious, here is a picture of the whole rack of T-26 shirts: