Now that I’m no longer employed in Japan, I feel more comfortable using the actual names of things and posting certain pieces of media that I had previously refrained from sharing.  As I have mentioned before, I still have quite a bit of media to work through.  With that in mind, I present to you item the first, a collection of videos that show a performance of the Sansa Odori, a traditional Japanese dance from the area around Morioka in Japan’s Iwate prefecture that, unlike most other forms of traditional dance, is actually fucking awesome rather than boring and lame.  This performance was put on by the Shizukuishi High School Traditional Dance Club (that name may lose something in the translation).  According to their sponsor, these students have traveled all over Japan to showcase the .  There are even plans for them to travel to Turkey for some kind of world conference or some such.  I taught most of the students in this video, which just makes watching it cooler.

My first exposure to this dance was at a special performance the club members put on for me in their tiny practice space when I started teaching at Shizukuishi High School.  I was not a huge fan of teaching at this school, frequently referring to it as the “School of Suck,” but seeing these kids perform for the first time, feeling the drums in that enclosed space and having all of my expectations vis a vis the general lameness of “heritage art forms” done away with, was one of the greatest moments of my life because for that one perfect, split second I realized that I was exactly where I wanted to be doing exactly what I wanted to do and would not change a single thing, a complete contentment that I do not experience often.

The first part of the video has been embedded into the website for your convenience.  I have linked to the other two parts  The entire performance is kind of long, but it’s worth watching all the way through because with each phase the dance gets more and more elaborate and cool:

Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKiv_B1j1Ks
Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvFd8UiRGaQ

Item the second: I have pictures up on Picasa from my trip to Kyoto in April, 2009.  Kyoto is a fun place that every human would benefit from seeing at least once in her or his life.  Here are some choice moments in all of their embedded Flash-y goodness:

The Iwatayama Monkey Park is near the Hankyu Railway’s Arashiyama Station, which makes it sort of a pain in the ass to get to as the Hankyu line is privately run and doesn’t connect seamlessly with the Japan Rail lines that people use most often.  This can be seen as a benefit, though, since it means that the monkey park is not all that popular as a tourist destination despite the fact that there really are only so many shrines and temples—Kyoto’s main points of interest, in other words—one can honestly expect to visit in a condensed amount of time.  And even if you aren’t sick of looking at old religious buildings by the time you make it to Arashiyama, you have to pass through a small Shinto shrine to get to the monkey park anyway, which is an example of working smarter rather than harder.  Once past the aforementioned Shinto shrine, it’s up the side of a mountain along some zig-zagging dirt paths to a flat section near the top. Iwatayama Monkey Park is not a zoo, but a sort of nature reserve; apparently these macaque monkeys are actually native to the mountain and the surrounding areas, which I did not know.  Even along the paths you can see the monkeys frolicking freely with no barrier between them and the park’s visitors.  There are few guard rails on the narrow paths up the side of the mountain, which is pretty normal for Japan.  You can purchase peanuts or apple slices to feed the monkeys for a very reasonable 100 yen, and although the feeding has to be done through a fence from within the rest house near the top of the mountain, outside of that you are able to mingle freely with the nature.  A handout given at the gate to all visitors warns you to not make eye contact with the monkeys because they can be aggressive, and that’s pretty much the extent of the buffer between you and the beasts.

What was great about this small attraction, beyond the fact that it allows you to feed monkeys ohmygosh wow, is that it all just works.  Everyone is cool and hangs out watching the monkeys fool around.  No one screams “OOOH OOOH OOOH AHHH AHHH” noises at the monkeys the way people do at zoos in America.  There is no litter, either along the path or around the summit where the park is located, and none of the trees have asinine bullshit carved into them.  The signs say not to touch the monkeys, so no one touches the monkeys—or if they do, they have the sense not to get caught.  I was there for a little over an hour (I was waiting to meet some friends who got lost trying to find the place), and at no point did I witness anything that could be defined as a dick move.

I spent a few moments trying to imagine a similar set up working in America, and it just doesn’t seem feasible to me at all.  You just know that there would really be only two ways such a venture could end.  I’d give it a week, maybe two, before a monkey would choke on a discarded candy bar wrapper and the whole undertaking would have to be dismantled and the area declared off limits to preserve the animal population.  Either that or the park would get sued out of existence by some litigious parent whose hellspawn looked at an alpha male monkey cross-eyed and got his or her ass bit.  It’d be a race to see who could cry “foul” first.  And if you think I’m being needlessly misanthropic, just look at what happens at amusement parks when some kid undoes his or her safety harness and falls splat to the ground: the ride or even the whole park has to be closed down as an act of penance by its administrators despite the very obvious fact that their mechanical fun machines were not to blame for the accident.

I keep coming back to this point, but one thing that I definitely will miss about living in Japan is not having to devote nearly as much of my time and attention on dealing with other people’s ignorant bullshit.  I mean, where in America would I be able to do this?:

Video of the park and of monkeys doing adorable monkey stuff can be viewed here.

Sapporo Snow Festival 2009: Everyone Here Is Crazy

I visited Sapporo for the world-renowned Snow Festival in February. The ice sculptures were pretty great, but my enjoyment of them was hampered somewhat by the fact that there was heavy snow all weekend. This video was taken in Odori Park amidst the insanity of a severe blizzard situation, where the only non-crazy person within walking distance was whoever was performing in the Yamaha keyboard booth next to one of the main event stages.

I was in the first group for the first race, and only made it about four steps before my feet caught in the snow and I fell to the ground. The rope attached to the tire remained clenched firmly in my hand, and I was dragged a pretty decent stretch behind the team before the two other teachers noticed that I was no longer level with them. The teacher relay team ended up not winning that race, although this was not entirely my fault. It’s cool though: I totally brought it home during the tug of war segment later that day.

I walked away from the race with my hands all scraped up and bleeding from being dragged on the ice. As I was taking stock of my injuries, I walked by a couple first-year girls huddling together to stay warm. “Good morning!” they both said. I waved at them. One of them pointed at my face and had a brief conversation with her friend. A group of Japanese teenagers who have been taking English for a while form a sort of gestalt organism; on their own they’d have a hard time communicating with me, but in a big enough group, they can usually come up with about the same level of conversational ability. This is a process that I am pretty used to by now: a group of students will approach me, and one of the brave ones will attempt to ask me a question. For example, “Where you from?” was popular when I first started teaching. The phrasing may be perfect, or it may be a little off. Either way, the asker of the question will then cock his or her head and say “Eh? Eh?” and will turn to converse with the other people in the group, running through several variations of the question in order to try and form a consensus. It actually is pretty interesting to see them perform these translations out loud because it helps me understand the differences in grammar between the two languages. “You where live? Are? Where are you… where are you live? From? Where are you from?” This can take 45 seconds or more, and I sometimes feel like I ran down the escalator at the subway station just in time to watch the train leave and right then understand that I’ll have to wait the full ten minutes for the next one.

“Red,” she said, and pointed at her face, and then at my face again.

“Ah, yes,” I said, after a moment of blank stares and awkward hand gestures. “My face is red. It is very cold today.” I mimed shivering and rubbing my arms. This was my best guess as to the meaning of their inquiry. It didn’t seem to satisfy them, but they appeared unwilling to take this line of questioning any further.

There was a short period of silence wherein we all stood there without any of us making a move to walk away. That was my cue to start asking them questions in English; both of these girls were in a class I taught and were noteworthy for being well-behaved and good-natured in a school full of angsty hardasses, so I was interested to know what clubs they were in, what their favorite subjects were, that kind of thing. This went on for perhaps ten minutes, at which point one of the school’s English teachers walked by. One of the girls motioned him over and asked him a question in Japanese.

“Blood,” he said, and then repeated it to make sure they had the pronunciation right. “Blood.” She pointed at my face again.

The teacher turned to me, nodded in recognition, and said, “You have blood on your face.” I reached up, and, sho’ nuff, my hand came back with red smears on it from what would turn out to be a few small scrapes on my cheek and upper lip. To their credit, the girls both took it in stride and were able to manage answers to every question I asked despite the sight of a crazed-looking gaijin with blood on his face staring them down. Good for them.

Pictures of the snow relay can be found on this Picasa Web Album. I have started using Picasa after discovering that Flickr limits you to only three photo sets. Hell with that.

So the pillows are a good band, and “Hybrid Rainbow” is perhaps their masterpiece, a song that I would say almost justifies humanity’s existence despite centuries of war and hatred and every kind of depravity imaginable. I can recall being nineteen years old, a recent high school graduate, watching FLCL for the first time just a couple of weeks before I headed off to college and my first real taste of the great unknown and thinking, man, it would be awesome to see these guys play live.

Imagine my surprise, then, that my arrival in Japan, already a fulfillment of my wildest outdated high school fantasies, coincided with the release of a new pillows album and a tour (codenamed the “Pied Piper Tour,” which I can’t turn into anything symbolic no matter how hard I try) to support said album. The pillows were playing in Sendai, the capital of Miyagi prefecture, easily within the range of a driven individual such as myself. Phone calls were made. Tickets were purchased. Travel arrangements were made. The thought rang clear in my mind: “I might get to see ‘Hybrid Rainbow’ performed live.” If that happened, I’d have another item to check off on my list of things I needed to do before I died.

The concert was to start at six o’clock on a Sunday evening in late September. The plan called for me to take the train to Sendai on Saturday morning—this was before I knew about the wonders of highway buses, which are cheaper and faster than trains when going between big cities—and stay with a friend of mine from back home who also does the teaching thing in Marumori, a small mountain town about an hour away from Sendai that feels a lot like what South Park would feel like if it was a real place and in Japan. We would check out Sendai on Sunday morning, and then hit up the concert, which started at six. Since it was a Sunday, I needed to be back in my own place for work the next morning, so I got a ticket for the 8:15 Shinkansen (bullet train) back to Morioka in time to catch the last train to my little podunk farming town. I figured the concert wouldn’t last much longer than two hours, if it even lasted that long, so not a huge loss. It was a perfect plan that failed in a spectacular(ly unspectacular) fashion.

The first stages of the plan went smoothly enough. I made it to Sendai without any problems, and Saturday night passed pleasantly, with much Melon Fanta consumed while complaining about the Japanese public school system and playing videogames. Sunday passed quickly as we explored the shopping arcade that Sendai is famous for, and soon enough it was time for our concert preparations to commence. We met up with another group of Americans, college exchange students or teachers all, and loitered in Sendai Station for a while swapping anecdotes and blocking pedestrian traffic. At about 5:30 I asked everyone assembled if maybe we shouldn’t head to the venue since the concert was going to start in a half hour.

“Doors open at six,” one among us said. “The concert doesn’t actually start till seven.” This was a serious problem.

My friend James, who had handled logistics, had misread (or not bothered to read) the kanji on the ticket, believing it to say “Starts – 6:00, Ends – 7:00” when it actually said “Doors open – 6:00, Concert Begins – 7:00.” Oddly enough, being illiterate does indeed suck as much as the public service announcements on teevee say that it does; that extra hour was kind of a big deal, upon which my entire plan for the evening hinged. In America it would only have taken me about 30 seconds to say “Well, I guess I’m calling in sick tomorrow” and enjoy the concert with no worries a’tall, but in Japan taking an unexpected day off from your job—even your stupid job where you spend the great majority of your time reading novels and and can’t even communicate with 90% of your coworkers—is a big deal that requires an excellent excuse and documentation. So that meant I had a ticket for an 8:20 train and a ticket for a 7:00 concert, which are good things to have by themselves but not such great things to have at the same time.

I was not very talkative as we made out way to the venue and stood waiting in line for the doors to open. Even when the show started I kept vacillating between “To hell with it, I’m just going to stay and figure out what to do afterward,” and “Well, I guess I’ll just try to enjoy the hour that I have.” This process preoccupied me, but I tried to enjoy the show as best I could. The pillows put on a good show, although I was mostly interested in hearing them play a handful of songs that I knew from FLCL, which was older material that they were less inclined to dip into. I was not pleased.

About 30 minutes in, during a pause between songs, someone in the audience shouted ”Hybrid Rainbow!“ and I held my breath.

The lead singer chuckled. “Too fast,” he said, in English. “Too early.”

Fuck, I thought, they’re saving it for the encore or something.

The band played a couple more songs that I was not familiar with and which were hard to enjoy given the circumstances, and during another pause someone else shouted, “Hybrid Rainbow!” At this point I had maybe 15 minutes to get to my train, enough time for maybe one more song before I absolutely had to leave.

“Too fast. Too early,” the lead singer said again. The members of the band began whispering among themselves.

I turned to leave, defeated, as more banter ensued.

I was just reaching for the door to the lobby when the band seemed to reverse their previous decision and started to play “Hybrid Rainbow.”

During those four perfect minutes, I was truly, unabashedly happy. Between the beginning and the ending of that one song, I was exactly where I wanted to be in the world, doing exactly what I wanted to do, and had no reservations or regrets. Just then It did not matter that I had to leave the concert early to go catch a train so I could be on time for a job that I did not enjoy, nor did it matter that I was aimless and unmotivated, that I had so far been too lazy to create anything that felt meaningful out of my time on earth, that I was weird and awkward and unsure of my place in the world; whatever choices I had made in my life up until that point, at that moment they were all the right choices because they had led me to that venue next to the Sendai train station where I watched the pillows play “Hybrid Rainbow” in front of an enthusiastic crowd. My triumph was utter. It was transcendent.

And, like most transcendent moments, this one was not able to support itself for long under the weight of its own quality.

After the song was over there was a short period of silence, and the band started retuning their instruments and talking amongst themselves. I headed towards the door, but, feeling invincible and uninhibited in the afterglow, I turned and shouted “Linda Linda!” before finally making good my escape. I thought this was hilarious at the time, but, given how irritated I used to (and still do) get at those assholes who shout “Freebird!” at concerts by bands who are decidedly not Lynard Skynard, I at least had the decency to feel bad about it later. I stopped just long enough to make a last minute impulse purchase at the merch table in front of the venue to celebrate my newfound enthusiasm for life and love and all the rest, and then I was ready to bounce.

After hearing “Hybrid Rainbow,” the decision to try and catch my train was a much easier one, and the emotional high of that one perfect moment propelled me forward as I ran through the station, retrieved my bag from the storage locker, and hoofed it up to the Shinkansen platform. Hoisting a big backpack and carrying a demented teddy bear in one hand, I’m sure that I made a deeply troubling sight. People left my path well alone. I quickly inquired about what platform I should go to—the guy I asked was trying to convey something to me that I could not get, but he eventually pointed me in the direction I needed to go—and took the stairs up to the platform three at a time.

Panting from the run, I stood and waited, my thumbs looped under the shoulder straps of my backpack, underarms and back starting to feel maybe just a little bit moist from the weight of my load and the unfamiliar exertion, ready to slide into a Shinkansen’s spacious seat and think happy thoughts all the way to Morioka, where I’d catch another train over to my town of residence. I was about seven minutes early. It had taken me less time than I thought it would to get to where I needed to be.

I paced up and down the platform and noticed with some trepidation that there weren’t very many other people waiting for this train. My trepidation turned to panic as the time listed on my ticket came and went. I went back down to the ticket area and made an inquiry of an older gentleman in a station uniform. Unfortunately, his English was not up to snuff, and neither was my Japanese; I couldn’t even remember how to say “I do not speak Japanese” in Japanese, which is a problem that I had had before and have often had since. Finally, after what seemed like an interminable period of him repeating the same phrase I did not recognize really slowly and with different inflections and pointing to different places on the small train schedule in his hands in a coded sequence that I was not able to decipher, he motioned with his hands and said “Wait, please.” About ten minutes later, a young-ish woman dressed in civilian clothes walked up to where I was standing. After exchanging a few words with the station guy, she turned to ask me what I needed help with. I explained my situation to her again. “The train is late,” she said. “Instead please take the Shinkansen headed for Akita when it comes and get off at Morioka Station. The Akita Shinkansen is also late, but it is less late.”

It turned out that “less late” meant “still more than an hour late,” which was especially galling after spending all that time being told at teacher training that the Japanese are shuffling automatons of soulless efficiency and woe be unto he who is even one minute late for anything. I was not happy about having to waste away in Sendai Station when there was still a perfectly good pillows concert going on literally next door. Eventually my consternation gave way to anxiety over whether or not I would make it to Morioka Station in time to catch the last train out to Ho-mu. Things did work themselves out, although I had to do some sprinting once I got to Morioka Station in order to facilitate this. I was told later that the show had gone on for about another 70 minutes after I left, but that only one other song I’d have recognized was played. And on Monday morning I was able to shuffle into work at my School of Suck, tired but on time, and totally tank my lessons for that day just like normal. God was in His heaven. All was right with the world.

So in the end I guess this concertgoing experience is a good representation of my time in Japan as a whole—a bunch of stupid bullshit punctuated by fleeting moments of blinding awesome-ness, a neverending footrace between elation in lane one and despair (or at least extreme irritation) in lane two. Additionally, in some kind of ridiculous Russian doll situation, maybe that is a pretty accurate description of life in general.

Supplemental:
Ride on Shooting Star (Ganbatte-Fest ‘08, Part 3) : Photos of the events described in this entry can be viewed on my Flickr page.

Japanese Laundromats: a Study in Cultural Differences

Tripping the Light Ascetic (Ganbatte-Fest ‘08, Part 2)

Opening a Japanese CD, Part 1
Opening a Japanese CD, Part 2