Archive for the 'Damn Tourists' Category

Sansa Odori and the Infinite Sadness

Published
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Mr. Blithe
on July 3, 2009
in Consumable media!, Damn Tourists and Japan!
. 3 Comments

Yeah, it’s been a while.  I have no excuses; although I have been busy trying to get myself situated now that I’m back home, it’s not the kind of busy where I don’t have time to pursue my hobbies.  Mostly I am just lazy, although there are times when I think that I might have undiagnosed ADD on which I can blame my lack of motivation and focus.  But the important thing is that I am back on the wagon now and have some important things to share with you.

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:

Don’t Say “Domo Arigatou” Because It Makes You Sound Like You’re Mentally Deficient: Styx Lied To You Because They Are Terrible Lying Liars

Published
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Mr. Blithe
on May 15, 2009
in Damn Tourists and Japan!
. 5 Comments

So I have mentioned previously that I visited Osaka for a few days at the tail end of the extended vacation I took back immediately after my teaching gig was over and done with. One of the things I did while I was in Osaka was attend Punkfest ‘09, a two-day concert featuring a number of prominent American alternative bands—Bad Religion, Less Than Jake, NOFX, Mindless Self Indulgence, Rise Against, and then some others I didn’t care about—and even a few totally swee Japanese ones—most notably Oreskaband, who put on what may be the best live show I have ever seen, ever.

It was interesting to observe the way the American bands carried themselves in front of a foreign audience. In more than a few cases the bands kind of acted like dicks: antagonizing people in the crowd, American-style swagger and grandstanding, excessive and asinine onstage banter along the lines of “we should really stop doing so much onstage banter because no one here can understand what we’re saying tee hee,” that kind of stuff. NOFX were especially bad, and even threw in a few jokes about kamikazes and atom bombs, which I guess isn’t that surprising. Bad Religion, Rise Against, and Madina Lake (who I’d never heard of before) were all pretty cool and played the part of gracious guests. That spoke well of them; the Japanese like humility.

Anyways, one thing I did notice was that the lead singers from almost all of the American acts at Punkspring began their sets with the phrase “Doumo arigatou Osaka!” I guess most people in the United States think “doumo arigatou” is how to say “thank you” in Japanese; I know that’s what I thought back before my stint as an ALT. But this was a strange phrase to hear after seven months in Japan, because that’s not actually how people say “thank you” in Japan.

In English, the standard terms for thanking people are modular. We start with the mother of them all, the phrase “thank you very much,” which we use when we feel strong gratitude. When we feel a smaller amount of gratitude we say “thank you” or “thanks” as a more formal, less emphatic form of expressing what is essentially the same sentiment.

Japanese is the same way. You start with the base phrase “doumo arigatou gozaimasu,” which is equivalent to “thank you very much.” For more informal situations—your server brings you your food, for example, or one of your students tells you they like your tie—you say “arigatou gozaimasu,” which is the most commonly used “thank you” phrase in day-to-day life. “Doumo” or “arigatou” can be used by themselves as even less formal substitutes if you are cultivating an air of jaded detachment, but you will never, ever hear a Japanese person use the phrase “doumo arigatou.” That just doesn’t happen. I admit that I do not know enough about the etymology of the Japanese language to explain what each of these words mean on their own: like many phrases I learned in Japan, I know when to use them but not exactly what they mean. My understanding, though, is that saying “domo arigatou” is along the same lines as an English-speaker saying “Thank you very.” Yeah, I know Styx sang that one song with the line “Doumo arigatou Mr. Roboto,” but it’s never a good idea to base your knowledge of the world on shitty corporate rock from the 1970’s.

As a final aside, it’s worth noting that after Mindless Self Indulgence’s set, the drummer—a somewhat-chubby woman with pigtails—grabbed the microphone from the lead singer and said, “Doumo arigatou gozaimashita!” which not only is the correct phrasing but is even in the past tense to indicate that she is thanking them for being a good audience. I was impressed, especially since MSI was arguably the least cerebral of all the bands playing that day.


New Photos: Sapporo Snow Festival

Published
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Mr. Blithe
on May 12, 2009
in Consumable media!, Damn Tourists and Japan!
. 4 Comments

I’m in the process of working through all the remaining material from my time in Japan: pictures, videos, amusing anecdotes, and all the rest. Towards that end, photos from my trip to Sapporo for the Snow Festival there can be found on my Picasa page. Or you can just look at the bottom of this entry and use the super high-tech embedded slide show action instead, if that’s more your speed. The pictures are pretty bangin’, I must say.

Tourist Spotlight: Iwatayama Monkey Park

Published
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Mr. Blithe
on April 5, 2009
in Consumable media!, Damn Tourists and Japan!
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The job’s over and done with, and my time in Japan is running out.  A lot’s happened, and I have many interesting things to say but not so much opportunity to say them just now.  I’ve been “on the road” (in a purely metaphysical sense, since all of my traveling thus far has been done by train) for about a week and a half now.  Crashed for a few days in a fellow ALT’s new apartment amid the Yokohama Hills—which resemble the movie “City of God” but a lot more upscale—before making my way to Kyoto, and then Osaka.  I’ve visited a lot of cool places and done a lot of tourist-y stuff.  Pictures will be forthcoming, but I’d like to take a moment to write about one of the highlights of my trip, the Iwatayama Monkey Park in the southern part of Kyoto.

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?:

Feeding a monkey.

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

Not dead, only dreaming…

Published
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Mr. Blithe
on March 29, 2009
in Damn Tourists, Japan! and Teaching in Japan
. 2 Comments

My last day of teaching was one week ago. There’s lots to talk about still, but my Internet connection is a little spotty now that I’ve moved out of my apartment. I will provide new entries and status updates with as much regularity as I can manage.

Sapporo Snow Festival 2009: Everyone Here Is Crazy

Published
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Mr. Blithe
on March 7, 2009
in Consumable media!, Damn Tourists, Everyone Else Is Crazy and Japan!
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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.

Life Imitates Art

Published
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Mr. Blithe
on January 27, 2009
in Damn Tourists, Japan!, Precocious Younglings, Stories from the Edge and The Day to Day
. 0 Comments

I was flipping through my journal earlier today while I was at work and came across an entry I’d made over Winter Break while I was staying with a couple of friends in Marumori and unwinding after our successful five-day excursion to Tokyo. Said entry detailed a small but extremely poignant (to me, at any rate) “Japan” type moment. I have reprinted it here with relevant hyperlinks for your reading (and viewing [and listening]) enjoyment:

January 05, 2009
12:40 AM

After spending the entire day loafing around Jamie’s apartment, him and James playing “Valkyria Chronicles” while I read the Murakami book I’d picked up in Sendai, the three of us stopped at a Daily Yamazaki, which is a well-known chain of Japanese convenience stores (or “konbini” as they are often referred to here), to get some latenight snacks. As we entered the store I heard the opening strains of a familiar tune from back when we were all in high school. “Dude,” I said, “It’s Jimmy Eat World, the one song with the video where everyone’s in their underwear.” We proceeded to make our way around the store picking up its various delectable wares, all the while singing along and doing a kind of shuffling walk that was almost-but-not-quite a dance. The only other person in the store was the middle-aged Japanese man working the cash register, who had obviously been trained to display no emotion. I found this to be an extremely cool little moment, and as we were driving back to Jamie’s apartment I realized that this experience really reminded me of that famous scene in Reality Bites where Winona Ryder and Janeane Garofolo dance around a convenience store to “My Sharona.” Except in Japan. Adding “except in Japan” to the end of any anecdote that evokes a particular memory from the past just increases the awesome exponentially.

Tokyo: Shibuya Crossing

Published
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Mr. Blithe
on December 30, 2008
in Consumable media!, Damn Tourists and Japan!
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Tokyo: Shibuya Crossing: While visiting Tokyo, I made a stop at Shibuya Station to cross the street at the (in)famous five-way stop there. I thought it would be cool to record the crossing, but this quickly turned out to have been not such a great idea.

The Eastern Capitol

Published
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Mr. Blithe
on December 27, 2008
in Damn Tourists, Everyone Else Is Crazy and Japan!
. 2 Comments

So I spent five days in Tokyo at the beginning of my Winter Vacation and have made a short detour to Miyagi prefecture with some friends before I head back to the frozen northlands from whence I came. Miyagi prefecture, with its milder climate and larger and more interesting capital city, is still a major improvement over the town in Iwate where I currently lay my head, but it seems like a major drag after the kidney punch to the senses that was Tokyo, the world’s largest metropolitan area. While this does mean that I have some time to breathe and do some writing, it wasn’t easy for me to get on that northbound bullet train, to leave behind what seemed like a great gig—all the glitz and glamour and energy from such an enormous population combined with a crime rate that would be phenomenally low for an American city a tiny tiny fraction of Tokyo’s size—for the promise of rice fields and sub-zero temperatures and poor cell phone reception. I’m not knocking rice fields, exactly, but they’re not really my thing.

As I rode the Shinkansen up to Miyagi, when I wasn’t sleeping or listening to the old man in the seat across from mine suck off a toothpick for what seemed like (and actually was) two hours, I spent some time reading a book about the ending of the world and allowed my mind to wander, entertaining visions of moving to Tokyo and doing the big-city thing after a lifetime spent in places where a bunch of my friends and I could get together and while away half the night standing in a circle asking each other a million permutations of the question, “So, what is there to do?” without ever coming up with an acceptable answer. Sure, the rent’s high and I’d continue to have trouble communicating with people due to my lack of Japanese ability for the foreseeable future and would still probably feel isolated and alone more often than not even amidst all those huddled millions…but my thinking is that if I can put myself in a place that has the best of everything to offer, I can at least be hopeful of eventually finding whatever it is that I am looking for—be it serenity, security, a decent cup of coffee, inspiration, motivation, and/or creepy anime memorabilia for me to browse through in back-alley storefronts and then not buy in quantities sufficient to last an Age. The seasons of my soul (or whatever) have often been characterized by unnamed longing, so a big city seems like it might be the right place to hang out in. It’s simple mathematics: even though I still don’t know what it is that I want out of life, it is statistically more likely that if I ever do figure that shit out, I will be in a better position to obtain whatever Thing it is in Tokyo than I would be in most other places. Unless that Thing I wanted out of life turned out to be snow, in which case my current place of residence would provide a pretty solid foundation on which to build my future.

In Iwate prefecture—a place that sucks even compared to the other sucky (and not-so-sucky-but-still-kind-of-meh) places I have spent significant amounts of time in, and sucks even more than a similarly proportioned American town would simply because of the language barrier—I often feel like I am drowning, so far removed from anything that moves me or even feels real that, for all my complaining, I don’t even know how to go about improving my life other than to wait for my current contract to expire in March and toss the dice again to see if the next place I end up will be an improvement. It’s hard for me to tell whether my current existential discomfort is due to my own bad attitude and inability to experience joy even while inhabiting a place that actually is beautiful and serene and magnificent, or whether I have 100% accurately described said place as being total ass and am thus justified in being a little disgruntled every now and then while I plan my escape. Am I making a Hell out of Heaven, or am I merely seeing Hell for what it is?

If I moved to Tokyo, though, maybe I’d finally be able to tell once and for all whether it’s me that’s crazy, or whether it’s everyone else.

I have a lot to say about Tokyo, although it might take me a while to get it all down. Stay tuned.