Class

Despite only getting 3.5 hours of sleep and not having time to prepare my class, it went great, especially when I played them my recording of me freestyling with my friend over a beat that we made a couple years ago.

Anyway, I want to put up lots of photos and actually update what’s been happening, but I’m completely wiped out now and I have to get up pretty early again tomorrow to go to my concert. I’ll be out all day and much of tomorrow night with that, so I won’t get a chance to catch up on all the details until Sunday, or even Monday evening (since I’m planning on getting up before sunrise on Monday and going on a massive bike trip around Kyoto.

Night.

uggh

I’m sorry I couldn’t write yesterday or much today, but I’ve been scrambling to try to submit my composition thesis to this competition. I’ve had a long time to do it, but I had to rewrite a bunch of the lyrics because I couldn’t get Bill Watterson’s permission to use the original lyrics I took from his comics. I was putting it off and trying to get a friend to help me make up new lyrics, but that didn’t really pan out and so I ended up scrambling yesterday and today to rewrite the lyrics. I also had a problem that I no longer have the composing software I used to write my piece before. I downloaded the demo version to do this on, but was partially foiled by the fact that I couldn’t save of print more than one page. However, I managed to overcome those problems and it’s all ready to send off in the morning.

Actually, it’s already the morning, 5am in the morning in fact, so I really need to go to sleep. I was also supposed to prepare for my class tonight, but there’s no way I’m doing that now. I’m just going to try to do some lightning-fast preparation during the 1.5hr commute tomorrow and try to get my students to do most of the work. That way they learn more and I don’t have to do as much work. Oh yeah.

Heckling

I had been feeling a touch sick (allergic?) lately, so it was nice to sleep in today and wake up with a relaxing cup of coffee. After that, I spent about two hours finishing memorizing this final piece I had to memorize for my chorus. It’s very long (about 15 minutes) and all in Japanese, and apparently they’ve been practising at almost exclusively at the one practice a week I can’t make because it’s too far away, so I’ve barely sung it. But I’m pretty good with it now; good enough, I think.

After that I headed to the Eve festival to catch the dance performance of this girl who lives next door. At her performance and all the other performances I checked out (and also at my own performances with the Zumbyes in June) I was struck by how unresponsive Japanese audiences are. They’re really pretty laidback and don’t give a lot of applause or cheering. Sometimes they all will clap along, but it’s invariably on beats 1 and 3; the Japanese don’t seem to be able to feel a backbeat to save their lives. (That’s not just me being racist, that’s what one of the ryosei said to me to explain why the Japanese don’t dance at parties or weddings).

The bands were mixed, some good, some awful, some in between. Except for their lyrics, none of them seemed very musically Japanese, but I guess that’s the way most of the music is here these days.

I still hadn’t eaten anything, so I picked up lots of food from some of the gazillion stalls lining the place. Really, the festival seems to mostly just be stall after stall selling food, with two or three performance areas to draw people. And they heckle you like crazy to get you to buy their stuff! It was ridiculous! I never thought the Japanese would be so forward. Even when I said that I was full, they were like “c’mon, you can stuff a little bit more in!”.

After that, I missioned way the heck out to Osaka for our first rehearsal with the chorus and the orchestra before our concert on Saturday. It wasn’t as long as usual (I actually spent just as long on the 3-hour return trip commute) and it was fairly good. It made me feel a little better about the chorus. I had been under the impression that these 4 not very good singers from the chorus were going to be singing the solos, which would have been embarassing, but it turns out they have legit professionals doing the solos.

On the way back, I ended up on the train with the director (a faculty member) and introduced myself for the first time and then had an interesting, if slightly long, hour and a half of small talk with him. He was interested in my musical interests here and wants me to bring him a CD of my compositions on Thursday. I’m not sure what I’ll do if they actually want to sing my choral song later in the year. I mean, I’d love to have my song performed, but I’m kind of looking forward to quitting and it’d be kind of awkward if I quit and then they proceeded to sing my song…

Well, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Wedding rings, festivals and feasting

So we’re finally getting around to getting Sawa’s photos up on my blog like I had said earlier we’d try to do everyday. I for one vote that Sawa puts up more photos, because these are sweet.

Sawa took this photo tonight from beneath the giant Christmas tree they erected in Doshisha for their yearly festival. All the students have the week off of school and there are all kinds of stalls selling food and performances and things. We just got back from Yokohama tonight and caught the end of today, but tomorrow I plan to go and check it out during the day.

Here are a couple from last week. The first one is Junpei and his friends from his seminar who came over to have a nabe party (where you boil food in a pot (“nabe”)) and then we heard screams coming from the hall and rushed out to take photos of them doing some kind of weird male bonding things just like boys apparently do everywhere in the world.

And here’s one of me and Sawa from our trip to Nara last week. The momiji were so pretty!

On the way back from the “Eve” festival we walked through the Gosho I’m always wandering through, and now I finally have a picture that does its beauty justice (courtesy of Sawa, of course, as all of these sweet pictures are).

Anyway, before all of that, we rode trains for a couple of hours North to Tochigi prefecture to make our wedding rings. The guy was really cool and it turned out amazingly well. I was sure I’d screw it up and it’d be horribly ugly, but the guy who runs it has a nice system where he lets us do it ourselves but touches it up at the end to smooth out the rougher patches. I can’t put up photos of that today, but maybe tomorrow… anyway they turned out so well, They also ended up being cheaper than it would’ve been to buy pre-made ones at most of the jewelry places in Japan!

We just munched on bread all day, so by the time we were back and had passed through the Eve festival we were starving and were in a celebratory mood, so even though we had a big delicious meal yesterday we decided to go all out and go to yakiniku to gorge ourselves on meat. We did, and it was awesome.

After being filled up a delicious amount, a trip to Haagen-Dazs took the cake and we returned full and incredibly happy to the dorm. Life is good.

Oh, speaking of which, I almost forgot…! Passing through the festival, I happened to see a stall run by a basketball club (actually a “circle”, which is a kind of club but more casual than official “clubs”). I had been meaning to try to join one since I got here but been kind of lazy and not known who to talk to, but I took this chance and apparently they are like the only club that practices at a time and place that’s convenient for me, so it looks like I finally have a place to play basketball here! Yes!

Yokohama

 Yesterday I basically spent the whole day at my chorus’ rehearsal, then hopped on the shinkansen to Yokohama. I had meant to take the overnight bus, but it turned out I should have reserved it a couple of days in advance, so I had to take the much faster and luxurious but three times as expensive bullet train.

The chorus rehearsal took 5 hours, and was going on for another half hour or so but I just had to leave. It’s actually really not that bad, except for how friggin long it always takes. If it was like 1.5 efficient hours each time I think I’d be OK with it, it’s just the length of time for not much gain. But I do feel better about them after it turns out that I don’t have to rent my own tux (they’re lending me a jacket). Also, I asked around a little and it is normal for people to pay a little bit to perform (although not 36,000 yen!), and I’m thinking that it’s possible they didn’t tell us until so late to give us the excuse not to pay the whole thing but still perform. Maybe. Anyway, I’ll stick it out through this concert, then probably quit and try to find a more fun singing group. On the shinkansen I worked on memorizing music for the concert. There’s one more hefty piece (in Japanese) that I have to memorize by the concert, but I think I can do it.

Today Sawa’s mum made us a delicious breakfast which it was lovely to take our time over eating. Then we headed into Tokyo to an extremely classy mall/shopping complex in Roppongi. The architecture and design were really cool, but in a very Tokyo way completely different to the traditional style of Kyoto. It’s certainly another very real side of Japan.

We visited a museum exhibit about this Dutch painter and another one about award-winning Japanese commercial designers (my favourite was this cool Kidzania thing  where kids get to learn about real life by trying it out themselves. It seems so cool!). Afterwards we randomly chose this Italian restaurant that turned out to be incredibly delicious. I’ve been having lots of good Japanaese food and beer and sake here, but just the other day I had been thinking how delicious it would be to have some delicious red wine and cheese, which there isn’t a lot of in Japan. But here, I got my wish, along with all kinds of other delicious Italian food and dessert (affogato!), and it was awesome, and it made me so happy.

Unfortunately, I forgot to bring my camera with me up here, so I couldn’t take any photos.

Tomorrow, it’s off to make our wedding rings!

Nara trip

Since today was a holiday (no class this week! My students and I are all happy!), the leader of the English conversation club organized a trip to the nearby historic city of Nara (which was briefly the capital for less than a century before they decided to move the capital to Kyoto). I had been looking forward to the trip, especially since I had been feeling guilty about not doing any exciting Japanese things for a couple of weeks. However, it was distinctly anticlimactic, as we only saw this one temple area, which was very cool, but not the main area with the huge Buddha statue that Nara is very famous for. That would have been fine, but the main reason was that it was just a strange vibe, I think because the selection of the 17 people was very eclectic. Everyone was nice, it’s just that there were some students and some older staff and I couldn’t figure out exactly what the relationship was between anyone. Also, it began by putting all these people into a train for an hour or so, with some sitting and some having to stand, which is just a guaranteed way to start off awkwardly with people who don’t know each other. Later on the evening we went to this delicious restaurant for dinner and everyone kind of loosened up and got to know each other, but that was after the trip. I’ll keep that in mind for whenever I organize an event like that and make sure to start off with a hearty get-to-know-each-other breakfast.

That was pretty much the whole day. Afterwards, Sawa headed off up to Yokohama, while I headed back to the dorm, cozied up with a niced cup of coffee and read Collapse and then practiced the shamisen a little. After my chorus rehearsal tomorrow I’m planning to try to catch the overnight bus (a first for me) up to Yokohama to see Sawa’s family and then the next day the two of us are going further up Honshu to make our own wedding rings!

I have to figure out what I’ll tell the chorus guys tomorrow. Oh, I think I forgot to mention, it turned out not to be possible to do the Empower trip, and so I decided to stick it out with the chorus through the concert after all. But I think they also expect me to come up with a tuxedo somehow. I need to figure out if that’s true, and if so how much that’ll cost…this is so frustrating. They did say that they’d understand if I couldn’t pay the whole ¥36000 on short notice, but they did pretty much say I should pay something, like at least ¥5000 or so… It’s tempting to just say “screw you guys, I’m quitting,” but I do feel like I probably should stick it out at this point…aaah I don’t know what to do! Maybe I’ll talk to him again after practice tomorrow and wait to decide till later.

Today was pretty nice. The English club was good as usual, although I think some of the members aren’t coming as much. Could be because they’re busy, or because they hate me…

After that, I took a nice meandering long route through the imperial palace on my way back to the dorm. The fall leaves are getting to be really pretty now. In about a week or so they’ll be at their peak, and I’m trying to organize a big bike trip all around Kyoto to check out the leaves and just have an excuse to bike all around Kyoto like I’ve been wanting to do for a while.

In my wandering, I came across this really cool little open-air library I’d been told about but hadn’t seen before. It doesn’t have a lot of books, but it’s really cute!

After practicing my utai and doing my weekly paid English conversation and catching up with my family, I went over to Sawa’s place to make my first Japanese recipe from our new cookbook. It worked like a charm and I made this delicious teriyaki chicken and Japanese parboiled spinach! It felt really good!

It made me think how cool it would be teach a university class about Japanese food, where you could learn Japanese vocab and expressions related to eating food, drink, restaurants, agriculture, etc. and could do practical work cooking and going out to eat. I think it’d be sweet! But Sawa thinks it’s stupid… (I don’t think it’s stupid!!!! –sawa)Oh yeah, before dinner I was really hungry and this cool sweet potato vendor was singing it’s weekly-ish song outside. I always love hearing his slightly out of tune recorded song (“ishi yaki imo, yaki tate”) and thought this would be a perfect time to try it. It was pretty good, but it was ¥500 for a friggin baked sweet potato! With no seasoning or anything! What a rip off! It did taste good, though.

After a nice long bath (reading Collapse) and tea, I headed back to the dorm, practiced shamisen for a little bit and enjoyed the amazing warmth of the kotatsu!

Sawa also made maccha latte for the first time, and it was soooo goooood! (good photos courtesy of Sawa)

Mrrrnnggggghh

Sorry I didn’t post anything yesterday. I ended up staying up till 4am finishing doing mid-term grades for my students. It always takes me much longer than I think to do my grading and class preparation. Hopefully after this batch it won’t be so bad…

The day before yesterday I had started feeling a little bit sick and had been feeling kind of stressed out for the last few days because I had kept on having things I had to do by the next day and not being able to do them in advance, so I hadn’t been getting as much sleep as I’d have liked. So, when I finally didn’t have any obligations, I ended up sleeping for 12 hours and waking up at 1pm, which felt great. Even better, after I woke up, I just had some breakfast and made myself some nice coffee and luxuriated in the freedom. After that I finally got around to writing a letter and getting a present made for Fujikawa-san, who is this amazing woman who has always been the main person helping out the Doshisha Fellow, but who just got sick last month and has been in the hospital for a while.

After that I practiced shamisen for about an hour (for the first time in a week), and was very pleased that I managed to sit seiza for a long time and that I’m improving a lot in the sounds I’m getting out of it and the ease with which I can find the right finger placements. It’s really fun learning a new instrument like this!

After a delicious fish dinner that Sawa made and the weekly dorm meeting, we cleaned up the common room and busted out the kotatsu, an amazing under-the-table heating device the Japanese have for keeping warm in the winter. I settled down to what I thought would be an hour or so of grading, but which turned into about 4.5 hours. Sigh… But, it was nice doing it in the kotatsu!

Wednesday is now the day Sawa and I will try to go out and do cool things around Kyoto, since we’ve both freed up our schedules for that day. Today we had these big plans to go to these cool exhibitions/temples, but it turned out we were too late for the exhibition, and the weather turned grim so it wouldn’t have been fun to go to the temple, which was a little sad. But, instead we went to the museum of Kyoto, which was pretty cool. It’s really neat seeing the history of this city which has sooo much history. I still am amazed to think that around the time all this bad-ass imperial stuff was happening there were no human beings at all in New Zealand…

After that little cultural experience, we ate delicious delicious beef. I realized that since about two weeks ago all I’ve been eating is fish, rice-based things, soy-based things and vegetables, so it was high time for some tender, delicious wagyuu steak. The only problem was, there wasn’t quite enough to fill me up, but we made up for it by getting some delicious creme brulees for dessert. We also bought some maccha (green tea powder) and cocoa for making maccha lattes and hot chocolates for those crazy people who don’t like coffee. With that arsenal complete, I want to have a hot drink party and maybe start having coffee hours like I had back at Amherst!

In the evening, Sawa and I finally got around to watching An Inconvenient Truth. After watching that and currently reading this book by Jared Diamond, Collapse, about environmental problems leading to society collapses, it really makes me want to do something to alleviate these problems, since it looks to me like human-caused environmental damage will be the defining issue of our generation. I always kind of thought that we’d eventually sort things out, but after reading about the fates of people on Easter Island who developed a big, prosperous population as they deforested and overhunted all their wood and food, and then promptly descended into civil war, famine and cannibalism, it makes me think that there’s no guarantee we’ll just figure out some way to make our problems go away…

Oh, on final thing that I’m really happy about: tomorrow I’m finally starting my plan of making Japanese food from the recipe book we bought! Sawa and I picked out two recipes and I just finished reading through them in Japanese. It’s a great way for me to force myself to actually study a little Japanese, and I think that it’ll help me remember all these words a lot better, because I’ll have all these other sensory stimuli to help me remember them by. Yay! It makes me happy!

Stupid chorus

This morning I had my utai lesson again, and helped my teacher with her English in return. In the morning I had planned to feast on delicious food from Eze Bleu, an amazingly good bakery right down the road, but for some reason they were closed today. I went to another bakery, but I could tell as soon as I walked in it wouldn’t be that good, so I ended up not having much to eat. However, after my lesson, my teacher gave me some delicious homemade salmon sushi, which was sweet.

Speaking of sweet, I picked up some amazingly good mamemochi (bean mochi) from this place nearby that always has a huge line in front of it, and with good reason I found. It’s so good! I also bought some espresso beans for the first time at a coffee place that’s also right down the road and supposedly really good. When you buy coffee beans there they also give you free coffee and let you munch on delicious chocolate things for free while you wait. My dorm’s location is really pretty much perfect.

After all that food stuff, it was time for some more food. I made my homemade pasta like I did last week, only this time I remembered to add the eggplant, and also threw in fresh mozzarella and basil. If I do say so myself, it was the best food I’ve ever made, let alone without a recipe. It was soooo gooooood!!!

When I went to chorus this evening, I was in a bad mood about having to memorize all this music for the upcoming concert and the fact that they’re just not as good or fun as the Zumbyes or even the choir back at Amherst. But the rehearsal was OK and I was feeling better about it, until at the end of the rehearsal one of the guys in charge told me that apparently everyone was expected to pay ¥36,000 to sing in this concert! They said that they’d understand if I couldn’t pay at this short notice, but…

This really pissed me off, especially because it was indicative of the general tendency of this group to not explain the commitments until it was too late. First, they pressured me into buying these expensive scores on my first day. Then, they said that the rehearsals would be from 6-8 on Monday and 2:30-6 on Saturday, but it turned out that it was usually from 5:30-9 on Mondays and 2:30-7 on Saturdays, plus they were trying to encourage me to do some extra stuff after THOSE rehearsals! Also, apparently I’m supposed to take care of getting my own tux for this concert somehow…

I had been planning to at least stick it out with this chorus, try to memorize all this music they want me to memorize and appear in this concert before considering quitting. This was partly because I didn’t want to bail out on them after committing, and partly because I thought it’d be a good experience to at least perform in a concert with a Japanese group. However, I was planning to give up this great opportunity to go on a student retreat in the Japanese wilderness with this cool monk and stuff because of my commitment to the group, but after being screwed around by them I don’t feel like I should have to do that, so I think if it’s not too late I’m just gonna quit this chorus, go on the cool trip, and try to find another way to sing that is more rewarding. There are just so many aspects of this chorus that frustrate me: the time commitment, this one director who sucks and the way it generally seems that seniority is valued more than actual skill, the overall mediocrity of the singers, the fact that I’m not necessarily a huge fan of classical choral music or that atmosphere anyway, and now this money thing… It’s not that I can’t afford it, it’s just the principal that they should tell me what the expectations are up front so I can decide what I want to do and not get pressured into doing things down the line.

After that unhappiness, though, Sawa and I watched this hilarious stand-up comedian (Jim Gaffagan) and drank delicious tea and ate the mamemochi, though, so things were all good. And now I can sleep in tomorrow, since I don’t have to go to the elementary school any more!

Sweets Paradise!

Yesterday we went on a trip with the ryosei and the students of the other dorms to this all-you-can-eat dessert place called Sweets Paradise.

I was really hungry when we got there, but it turned out we had to wait 3 hours before we could eat! In the meantime we went bowling, where Sawa suddenly became amazing and romped all of us with 158, her personal record.

We also played these stupid, pointless medal games and unwinnable UFO games with the free tokens they gave us from bowling.

Finally it was 4pm and time to eat. I was so hungry, and I had planned to eat only dessert to maximize my sweets potential. However, after this first opening salvo

I felt awful and couldn’t stand any more dessert, so I just had a lot of pasta and curry rice and stuff like that. It was pretty sweet, although being all-you-can-eat the quality wasn’t particularly phenomenal.

Afterward, I picked up a book to eventually study for my Japanese proficiency test when I try for the highest level next year. We also stopped in at Meidi-ya, where they have imported foods like good cheese that you can’t get here, but everything was so ridiculously expensive it just is not worth it.

I tried to finish my grading like I had planned, but was distracted with fun things like planning ring designs with Sawa (we came up with a really cool one, but I’m forbidden to show them now) and going out for long-postponed drinks with this American friend who has hooked me up with some great contacts, like my shamisen teacher.

Today, I woke up earlyish to go to my utai teacher’s pupils’ recital. I thought they’d all sing a little excerpt from a noh play, but it turned out they sang all the way through three entire noh plays! (although without the long instrumental and dance interludes, so each one was ONLY an hour or so). Other than one middle-aged woman who left early, I was the only one there under about 60 or 70.

It was very strange, but a cool chance to interact with old Japanese people in their natural habitat. They talk a lot about their kids, and about their various health things, and about how the younger generation knows nothing of the glory of the old days. In other words, they seem to be just like old white people.

After that, I did a little more grading, drank a lot of coffee (actually interspersed throughout the day…I love the new espresso machine) and went to this delicious tofu place with Sawa and William.

I went down a little early to meet them, and then it turned out they got lost and were about 30 or 40 minutes late. Today it suddenly became bitterly cold after many weeks of unseasonably warm weather, and it started to rain while I was waiting for them, which was no fun. I took shelter in this kouban (corner police office) for a little while, but it was so depressing in their I braved the cold and went and checked out the Tenmangu shrine across the street. It was pretty cool, albeit dark and rainy and cold.

Back home I finally finished grading, although I didn’t have time to go through and give each student a mid-semester grade and personal evaluation as I had planned. I’ll try to do that by tomorrow night. Once I’m done with that and plan my next class, I won’t have to worry about doing any work for me class for two weeks, because this Friday is a holiday!

Class karaoke

Today I spent the whole day with my English class, first teaching them, then singing karaoke with them!

The teaching part didn’t go too well, actually. Since they’d been doing so well, I thought I’d try to push them a little further and have them work on critical thinking and constructing arguments and using evidence to support their points, but it proved to be much too difficult for them. Now that I think about it, it’s a hard enough thing to think about in your native language, let alone in another one, so it’s fair enough that they struggled with it.

After the class, I had a brief, solitary dinner in a soba place that was recommended to me that has their own local soba and local sake.

They were both extremely delicious, and it was kind of cool to just sit on my own and eat and think.

Then I went to karaoke. 19 of my 33 students ended up coming, which I thought was pretty good, and they all seemed to have a really good time.

They were very surprised to learn that I spoke pretty decent Japanese, could sing and was only 22 years old. At the end I had a brilliant idea and for the last song we all piled into one karaoke room and sang “Beauty and the Beast” together, which was the first song I showed them in the class. It was a really great time and hopefully they’ll all get even more into the class now, unless it backfires and they lose their respect for me as a teacher and start going crazy in class…

Losing weight

So, apparently I’ve lost 9kgs since I came to Japan…. That’s more than 10% of my pre-Japan weight! If I keep up this (arithmetic) rate, I’ll have almost completely disappeared by the time my fellowship ends!

I am feeling pretty healthy, though, much healthier than I felt at Amherst, I think. I’m getting lots more sleep than I did at Amherst, and eating healthier food in better portions, usually home-cooked or good restaurant food instead of mass-produced all-you-can-eat dining hall food and deliveries. I’m also getting plenty of exercise from biking around everywhere. The only things I should work on are getting some more serious exercise (like finally getting around to seriously trying to find a basketball club or place to play) and making sure to eat breakfast, since I often only end up eating a brunch and a dinner meal every day.

Speaking of food, Sawa and I made two purchases that I think will revolutionize our eating. One was a Zagat’s guide to restaurants of Kyoto, Osaka and Kobe (the Kansai region). It’s always so hard to find an objective opinion about what places are good and reasonably priced, so now that we have this guide we’ll hopefully be able to avoid going to crappy restaurants and make the most of our time and money eating out here.

The other was a cookbook of your most basic Japanese dishes (in Japanese). I’ve been wanting to learn this kind of thing since I got here, but we didn’t have a convenient cookbook that had all the recipes laid out and well-explained. The plan now is for Sawa and I to choose a meal together the night before it’s my turn to cook, and for me to read the recipe (doubling as Japanese study) and then try cooking it myself the next day. Gradually, I should learn both all the words I’ll need to know for Japanese foods, and how to cook them! Yay!

I was very proud of myself because I made this delicious, nutritious past meal from scratch.

I just bought a few vegetables I thought would be good with pasta, sautéed some onions and spices in garlic, cooked the vegetables and threw them in the pasta. It was great, if I do say so myself! The only problem was that eggplant was supposed to be the highlight, but I forgot to add it… Also, it could have used some delicious cheese. There’s still enough vegetables for another batch, so next time I’ll make sure to add those.

I also finally retrieved my bike. It cost ¥2300, but it was so worth it! Biking is so incredibly useful in Kyoto, and when you don’t have one it feels like suuuuch a hassle having to walk around.

Just when I was about to go to sleep, the ryosei decided to head off to a sento. Since I’d been wanting to go with them the last few times (they go almost every other day) but always been too busy/sleepy, I decided to go. It was great, as always, especially downing the ice-cold iced coffee afterwards.

I finally planned my class for tomorrow. I’m going to try to introduce them to critical thinking and have the whole class try to construct essay outlines on both sides of the essay question I gave them and see which side seems to have a better argument. Also, we’re going out to class karaoke in the evening, which should be awesome!

Oh, and here is a photo from the horse races last weekend.

And here is a photo of the sweet, sweet, long-awaited espresso machine. It makes me ever so happy.

Last full day at the elementary school

Yesterday was very busy, as I got up at 7am to go to the elementary school, got back at 6pm, had a shamisen lesson from 8-9 and then a dorm meeting from 10-11:30. I had trouble sleeping (I think from being up till 5am the night before), so I couldn’t get to sleep until 2am and only got five hours sleep, so by the end of the night I was exhausted and couldn’t stay up to write my blog.

After the day at the elementary school, I was very glad that I had decided to stop going as much. I definitely felt like recently I’ve been less needed there and am getting less out of it. It’s become more like, “well, since you’re here, you may as well read some of these things out in English”, but I don’t feel like I have that much of a purpose. I think it’ll actually be better if I only come for an hour or two every few weeks, but have something to do when I come like teach them a song or something. I’m very glad that that’s taken care of now. However, it was a little weird, because when I told the main lady there about my decision, she just said “oh, OK…” and that was it. I think she might not have really understood what I meant, because she seemed kind of busy. She’s usually really cool, so I was surprised at her lack of reaction. I think I’ll email her to make sure she understood me.

Today I had my utai lesson, and afterwards spent an hour helping edit her translation. It seems that instead of payment, she just wants me to teach/edit her English in return, which is fine by me. After chatting with my family and dinner, I spent a couple of hours writing my mid-year report about the fellowship, so I’m kind of burnt out from writing now and I’m gonna crash. Night!

Schedule and late-night grading

Sorry I didn’t update my blog yesterday, but I decided to start having a sabbath again when I took a few hours to reflect on my schedule and time management. Also, I was up till 5am grading my students’ damn homework in time for my friend to bring it in to them today for them to collect. It was like being in college and staying up late with homework all over again. It’s really my own fault, since I’ve been giving them too much homework.

I just gave my students a feedback survey about their own effort and my teaching style, and the general consensus was that I give too much homework. So, obviously, if I stop doing that everyone will be happier! They also said I talk too fast, but other than that they seem to be really enjoying and engaging in the class and appreciate the work I put in, which makes me really happy. I always thought I wanted to teach, but was always worried I wouldn’t actually like it as much once I got to teach my own class, but even though I’m teaching English, which is not really my main interest, I’m really enjoying it!

I realized when I looked at my schedule, though, that the reason I’ve been feeling so busy is that I actually am! I’ve already managed to accumulate enough activities that, including commuting time, the 6 or so hours I need to spend on grading and planning my class and an hour a night of writing in my blog, I now have almost a full 40-hour work week of activites scheduled, without even thinking about the time I should spend learning and Japanese and practicing my singing and shamisen! After thinking about it, I think I’m going to have to cut back on my teaching at the elementary school. As much as I love the kids, I don’t feel like I’m getting so much out of it that it’s worth preventing me from doing the things I wanted to be in Japan to do (like studying Japanese and Japanese music). I may consider dropping chorus later on too, because it’s a full 9 hour time commitment, and it’s just not amazingly fun. It is great to keep me singing and learning Japanese related to singing and music, but it’s so frustrating after I’ve been used to singing with a group that’s much better and much more fun in Amherst. I’ll definitely stick it out through the big concert on Dec. 1st, then reconsider. I think if I can find a better/more fun group where I can sing, I might try that. I realized at Amherst that I really like being involved in successful organizations, where you get so much out because everyone is into it and your work is appreciated and you learn a lot.

Anyway, yesterday I went to a horse race for the first time at the invitation of one of the ryosei (Hayao). Apparently it’s a really big thing in Japan; there were even lots of families going there, which I can’t say I really approve of. It was really interesting to see how the whole thing works and chat a little with Hayao and Yuka (a girl from the next door dorm who came along), but there are a lot of more productive ways to spend a day. I was relieved when it started raining and we had an excuse to go back after only three races instead of a whole day.

When we got back I made them both a latte on my new espresso machine and we had a very long chat about love. It was very interesting, and I was very glad that I could talk about things like that in Japanese. This morning I also made Junpei a latte and we chatted for a while. I’m so glad it’s here, having coffee with people was always a great way to have conversations with people at Amherst, and now it’s a great way for me to practice Japanese too!

I also practiced my shamisen yesterday for the first time on my own. Now that I’ve got my espresso machine, shamisen, lessons organized, and a new time management schedule, it feels like everything’s all lined up and I’m about to start getting all the things done I’ve been meaning to do since I got here! Of course I always say that, but I think this time it’s more true than it has been before.

Perfection complete

The last two days have been really packed…so packed I forgot to take down the laundry I had put up three days ago!

Yesterday I had my class, which went really well. It feels so good to feel like the class is really improving and learning and enjoying it! Yesterday I modified the “West Wind Blows” game we had been playing to make it a little more abstract and had them say their own opinions about politics and things like that. We also talked about Whale Rider, which they mostly seemed to have watched, again somewhat to my surprise since I thought it might be hard for them to find. At the end of the class I had them fill out feedback forms about how they thought they were doing and how they felt about my teaching, which I’ll use to think about the rest of the semester and to give them mid-semester grades and feedback.

Kimura-san, who I hung out with the first day I taught, managed to find me a shamisen! He apparently had an old beat-up one that he never used lying around. This was perfect, and avoided me having to spend a lot of money buying an instrument I have no idea about at this stage. It’s so weird to think that we randomly met at Amherst 2 years ago when he randomly appeared at a one-off jazz night I organized on a whim, he joined in with us on his own sanshin (a shamisen variant), and now two years later we’re working together in Japan and he’s lending me a shamisen and later on that night we jammed together again at his house, me on his shamisen and him on his sanshin!

He had invited Sawa and I to his house for dinner, which I gladly accepted since he’s a great guy and I felt really bad about missing out on his last dinner invitation last month. Before we went to dinner we stopped by the Eikando temple which was right next to his house. He used to work part-time in a tea vendor shop there, so he got us in for free and hooked us up with free amazingly delicious tea. It was my first time visiting a temple late at night (they’re usually not open that late, but they are now to accommodate the tourists starting to come for the autumn leaves). It was maybe even prettier than in the day, with the lights throwing pretty shadows all over. Sitting all together in the gorgeous evening drinking delicious tea beneath multicoloured leaves reflecting over this gorgeous pond was such a wonderful experience!

The Japanese really know how to light things up in a pretty way. The gardens are just ridiculous. I thought the Japanese garden we have at Amherst was pretty cool, but it’s so lame compared to even gardens in som people’s houses. Then if you go to temples (or the place Sawa and I are getting married!) you just get blown away by the beauty of the gardens. Before I came, I thought of temples and shrines as being about grand architecture and religiousness, but really the highlight of them seems to be their beautiful natural scenery and gardens. I think they end up serving a very special purpose in the city, not just of preserving culture and religion, but preserving beautiful natural areas that might otherwise be cleared, paved and developed.

Dinner at the Kimura’s place afterward was delicious and very fun. It was a little weird, because it felt like such an adult thing: Sawa and I went to their house and we had dinner together. Kimura-san is around 30, married, and just had a baby, so I got to hold the baby and sing it a lullaby to sleep. We had a really great time, but it definitely felt more like a grown-up kind of fun. A cool grown-up kind of fun, though, which is good.

Then today I went to see my first Noh play. I had been worried about it being really expensive, but it turn out that, rather than me having to pay to see it, the performers (who are amateurs) pay around ¥10,000 to perform, which includes providing us audience members with a free obento lunch and a souvenir of some tea cups! Sweet deal!

Maybe that’s the only way they can get audiences to watch, because it was pretty damn boring! I mean, it was really interesting to see what it was like, but I wouldn’t have minded if they’d hurried through the middle hour or hour and a half. I’m not saying it’s necessarily boring, but for someone used to Western style musical theatre, everything was completely the opposite of what’s usually thought of as exciting. The melodies are mostly a monotone, monorhythmic chanting, there isn’t really any plot, the main female character wears a mask and huge clothes so you can’t see any part of her body, and the dancing and walking is intentionally about as slow as humanly possible. The coolest part to me was the way the drummers sing these groovy little chanting things while they drum. They kind of go “yo and swoop up from really low and then suddenly break and go really high, and it sounds really neat. And one of them raises his hand as he does it very dramatically, then all of a sudden whacks the crap out of his drum. He was definitely the energetic highlight of the performance.

One thing that wasn’t different from Western opera or classical concerts was the audience: they were all old people, dressed up very fancily, and all seemed to be going more because it’s supposed to be refined than because they actually seemed to enjoy it. Many of them were sleeping. For me, I think it’s a little weird to call Noh one of the pinnacles of Japanese culture, but then again I think the same thing about stuffy opera/classical performances. I think it’s kind of a combination of elitism and a desire to preserve traditions, but I think that when they’re preserved despite the changing culture around them, they lose their relevance and vitality. But, anyway, I still want to try to learn how to do it, as I think it’ll be good for me to try to learn more about it, and also because I think many other Japanese singing styles (including some modern pop singers like Hajime Chitose) are based on the same unique vibrato-y singing style.

When I got back from the Noh play, I went to pick up my bike that I had left outside the subway station last night because of a mix-up with my transportation plans. Unfortunately, although I thought that the Kyoto bike parking enforcement people were a complete joke and just went around putting little stickers on your bike if you parked it illegally (as everyone does), it turns out that, at least this once, they will actually impound your bike. (I know I should park legally, but it’s a lot better for the environment and my wallet and my body than taking a subway or a bus, and it’s hard to park legally)

(Incidentally, I’ve lost mad weight since I’ve come to Japan. I’m not sure exactly how much, but I think maybe 5 or 6 kgs. A combination of healthier food, smaller portions, and biking and walking everywhere, I think.)

Anyway, that put me in a crappy mood, until I got home and found………
MY ESPRESSO MACHINE HAD ARRIVED! I had almost given up hope!
I couldn’t bask in the glory then because I had to go to choir, which was not that fun because they spent way too long on a single song. It’s really tough trying to enjoy this choir after singing with the Zumbyes for so long, which was so much fun and so much better and more efficient with rehearsals. But, I don’t think it’ll be easy or even possible to ever find a group as fun as that.

Once that was over and I had dinner, Sawa and I went back to my dorm to revel in the glory of the espresso machine. After a couple of false starts, we got it going and it was so good! Life had been pretty much perfect until now, living in this gorgeous city together with nice dorm mates, fun activities and delicious meals all the time and interesting work, but now that the espresso machine is here it is officially perfect (except for the bike impounding).

Date

Here’s a picture of the pancakes I made yesterday…

Today Sawa and I went on a date for the first time in a while after going to the English club in the morning as usual. The English club is very nice because the people are very friendly and we have nice conversations, but it’s also very strictly kept to just under an hour because everyone has to go back to work, so there’s never the awkward phase where everyone’s kind of ready to be done but no one wants to be the one to say “Well…guess I’d better be hiting the old dusty trail…” Also, they give us free lunch, which I never say no to. And they’re inviting us on a trip to Nara in a couple of weeks, which should be a lot of fun.

Anyway, after that we headed downtown and looked into booking a trip up to Sapporo in February for the famous “yuki matsuri” (snow festival) where they have huge awesome snow sculptures and things. I’m also really interested in going up there to Hokkaido because it’s supposed to be very different from the rest of Japan. It’s famous for it’s delicious seafood and dairy products. It’s also where the few remaining indigenous ainu are, and I’d like to be able to learn a little more about them if possible.

Other places/events I’m looking forward to in the coming year are:
-a bike trip all around Kyoto in a week or two to see the autumn leaves and get a grasp of the geography.
-a trip with the ryosei to an onsen just before New Year’s
-New Year’s with Sawa’s family in Yokohama
-climbing Mt. Fuji with the ryosei maybe late next summer (when they’re working in Tokyo and it’s hot enough that their won’t be risks of severe cold weather/blizzards)
-Going to Okinawa some time, maybe as a honeymoon thing
-Hanami when the cherry blossoms bloom next spring (when you go have a picnic in parks and watch the blossoms and sing karaoke)

After that we went to see Hairspray. It was my first time going to a Japanese movie theatre. Although it was pretty expensive (¥1800 per person), it wasn’t as ridiculously more expenive than NZ or US movies than I had imagined. Still, it’s not something I want to do too regularly. Hairspray was great, it was such a feel-good movie! The only problem is that it was way too feel-good and improbably neat and real life is nothing like it, but it was obviously aware of that and had fun with it, so I have no complaints. Sawa overhead a 20-something girl leaving the theatre saying that the “middle eastern character was really hot”. Apparently she meant the black character, since there were certainly no middle eastern characters to be seen. I’m not sure whether it’s good or bad that she knows so little about racial differences as to confuse African-Americans and Middle Easterners, but is oblivious enough to them to be able to be attracted to people of different races. Racial diversity is certainly not a big part of life in Japan, where 99% of the population is Japanese, so it’s mostly about Japanese vs non-Japanese.

After that we went to this sushi restaurant we found in Sawa’s guide book. We were expecting it to be pretty pricey but good, but were pleasantly surprised to find that it was pretty damn cheap as far as sushi goes and still really good! It wasn’t quite as deliciously fresh and good as the sushi I had in June when I came with the Zumbyes, but that was fish caught fresh that morning at one of the most famous sushi places in the Tsukiji fish market, so it was pretty much the freshest sushi I’ll ever get anywhere in the world that I don’t catch myself. After being spoiled by that, I don’t imagine I’ll get sushi better than that no matter how expensive it is.

After that delicious meal we went to grab some Haagen-Dazs ice cream and proceeded to have a long discussion about girls wearing ridiculously short shorts/skirts and just generally spending huge amounts of time and money on clothes/make-up in Japan. It’s a very interesting issue, and I think it’s mostly a product of the cultural/economic situation in Japan where women are generally expected to be housewives/mothers and men work long hours at companies. Thus, women aren’t expected to work to support themselves normally, and are forced to try to attract men who will be able to support them by making themselves very attractive. I’m not sure why this situation is the way it is. It could be because Japan is wealthy enough to be able to able to support single-income families, like rich men do with trophy wives in the West. But on the other hand, many poor countries have similar expectations of women. Maybe the real question is not why Japan expects woman to behave like that, but why Western democracies began expecting women to work along with men last century, since prior to that I believe most cultures divided labor and household work between men and women, respectively. Not really sure.

Japanese music begins

Today was great! I finally feel like I’m getting started with my Japanese music stuff, since I had my first real shamisen and Noh utai lessons today. The utai lessons were interesting, although I don’t know how well I’ll be able to progress. It seems like for utai you just intone the words in a monotone voice and rhythm that sounds cool, although I think it gets a little more sophisticated as you go on. I’m going to see a Noh play for the first time on Saturday, so that should help me understand a little more what I’m getting into. Also, I think it’s going to be a struggle for me to understand the Noh stuff I’m singing, because it’s kind of in old school Japanese that most Japanese would have some trouble understanding. But, if nothing else it’ll be an interesting experience, and the teacher seems like she’s going to give me lessons for free, in return for just doing minor help with her English!

My shamisen lesson was cool. My teacher showed me the basics, and then I played through a song, reading from the Japanese style score. It’s really very simple to understand the notation system, much more so than Western notation. It’s basically the same idea as guitar tab writing. It was very heartening to see how quickly I could learn it. I even started being able to find the right position on the strings without looking at my fingers! By the end of thirty minutes or so of sitting on my knees, though, my legs were completely numb, and after I forced them into a normal position they hurt like hell for a minute as the blood flow returned.

Ooh, and after pretty much giving up hope that one of my acquaintances would have a shamisen, someone emailed me today offering to lend me his!

I just realized that, from now on, I’m going to have: chorus practice on Monday nights, shamisen lessons on Tuesday, Noh utai lessons on Wednesday, maybe gagaku (traditional court music) on Friday nights (I’m going to try it out tomorrow and see), and more chorus on Saturdays. Not to mention that I need to find time to practice shamisen and utai, and start studying Japanese seriously. I’m thinking about cutting back on my elementary school teaching to make room for these things. But, I’ll wait for a little bit and see.

Besides that, Sawa and I got to sleep late today, which was really nice, and I made a nice pancake breakfast, as well as a dinner of fish with lemon butter sauce and eggplant sesame salad, and we had some cheesecake and tea from Papa Jon’s, so it was a pretty great day. I realized that I haven’t made much Japanese food for a while, after being so excited about doing it before. I think I got a little intimidated by having to the read the recipes, but if I can just have a little discipline about reading the recipes ahead of time as Japanese practice, I think it’ll be fun to get back into it. I want to try to find good comprehensive Japanese cookbook, get Sawa to help me choose recipes, and then try reading the recipes the day before and looking up words I don’t understand.

Oh, and when we got back to the dorm, there were a bunch of Junpei’s (one of the ryosei) friends and we hung out with them and chatted and had a good time. I’ve definitely gotten a lot better at chatting in Japanese, as Junpei mentioned.

Second shamisen lesson…almost

Sorry I couldn’t update my blog yesterday, I was up late and had to get up early to go to the elementary school this morning.

I uploaded a few photos from my visit to the Imperial Palace the other day and the welcome party with the chorus.

Here are the dancers and musicians from the performance.

And here is part of the sweet garden.

And finally, me at the welcome party:

After I wrote my blog on Sunday, I ended up staying up late talking with Sawa for a long time, so I slept really late the next day. I felt slightly bad because I had been planning to finish planning my class, but it was totally worth it. After that, I went shopping for groceries for an early dinner, stopped for a minute to enjoy an iced coffee on the balcony of my dorm (I’m getting a little addicted to this coffee relaxation ritual) before heading back to make dinner, which was this spaghetti with pesto sauce and sautéed eggplant with pesto and mozzarella.

It was pretty damn delicious, if I do say so myself. The only problem was, we don’t have a food processor or blender, so I bought a crappy mortar and pestle from the 100 yen shop which proved not up to the task, leading to a pesto with lots of fairly chunky bits of garlicky surprise.
After that I went to chorus. When I signed up, they said that it was from 6-8 on Mondays and 2:30-6 on Saturdays, which seemed like really a lot. However, it turns out that it actually often starts at 5:30 on Mondays, and it always goes for an hour after when they say it will. I don’t know why they don’t just say that it’s from 5:30-9 in the first place, unless they’re trying to trick people into joining before they realize how much commitment it is. I guess in Japan people are just supposed to have one group that they’re really committed to and the idea that people have other things to do besides their one club is not so pronounced? One thing that I thought was quite amusing was that they actually handed out a sheet in choir showing the attendance rates of all the members, complete to three significant figures. That is pretty hardcore.

I was hoping to go to sleep early after that, but Marika, the former fellow, was back in town for a day and invited me to this Mexican dance music party. I biked over there through the rain and hung out for a little while and talked with her about the Fellowship, since we were meeting with Morita-sensei the next day to talk about it. I ended up getting back and to sleep pretty late, so I was a little tired today when I taught the elementary school kids.

It was pretty uneventful today. I had to leave early to meet with Marika and Morita-sensei, so I just helped out in a couple of English classes reading out stories in English and helping them memorize their lines for an upcoming play. I’m still enjoying the work, although I feel like now that I’m starting to get a bit busy, I might want to reduce my involvement as the year closes up and become more of a guest. We’ll see, though.

The meeting with Morita-sensei went pretty well. I was especially pleased to hear that he wants to try to keep the Fellow living in a dorm with Japanese students, as I was (and am still a little) worried the administration would try to force the students out and dump the Fellow in some isolated place without the chance to interact with Japanese students.

After that I wrote a recommendation for my friend Chris, who wants to get the Fellowship for next year. He’s a great guy, so it was fun to write.

After a delicious pork and apple dinner Sawa made, I went off to my shamisen lesson. Unfortunately, it turned out that I messed up and I’m actually supposed to go tomorrow… whoops. Oh, I ended up not going to buy a shamisen yesterday, partly because I would have had to get up to early, and partly because I realized that it would be silly to spend so much money buying it before I’ve rented it for a little while or at least had someone who knows about them come help me choose. So, I’ll ask my teacher tomorrow. I really need to get ahold of a shamisen soon, though; I really want to start practicing. I also have my first Noh utai lesson tomorrow.

After that, I spent the rest of the night finishing planning my lesson for Friday. I’m doing better than I did the last few weeks, in that I finished on Tuesday night and not Thursday night, but I had pledged to myself to finish planning by the end of the weekend. Oh well, I’m getting there.

Imperial Palace and nomikai

This morning we did more sightseeing with Sawa’s family. Today was more local, just the area between Sawa’s apartment and my dorm. This did happen to include the imperial palace, which happened to be in its once-a-year open to the public phase. We went to see that, and happened to arrive five minutes before they had a performance of traditional court music with dancing, which was perfect for me. It was really cool seeing them perform. It was interesting to see how disconnected the public was from the performance. What I assume was a very quiet, introspective music for the rich elite was on display for a crowd of tourists and was hard to hear in the crowd over the sounds of people taking photos on their cellphones and mumbling about having trouble seeing and being ready to go. Times have certainly changed.

It was also incredibly cool seeing the throne where the emperor used to sit over 1,000 years ago! This city has so much history, it’s hard to even comprehend it when I’m from a country where even the indigenous people hadn’t arrived then.

We came across a tasty Italian restaurant when desperately looking for a restaurant to take Sawa’s family to. After a tasty lunch they headed back to Kyoto and I graded papers for my class. I was meaning to finish all the grading and planning for the week by tonight, but I only finished the grading before I had to head off to a welcome party for my choir. We went to an izakya for food and drinks (free for me!) and had a great time getting to know the choir people a little better. We hung out a little on the banks of the Kamogawa, which is full of young people listening to the amateur musicians who perform there and couples hanging out and stuff like that.

Tomorrow I’m going to try to go to Osaka and find a shamisen to rent or buy used. That should be quite an adventure, especially since Sawa’s working and can’t help me out.

Sighsteeing with the future in-laws

 

Today was a great day of sightseeing and delicious eating with Sawa’s family. We woke up in the morning and saw off Kana, who headed back to Yokohama, and then went to meet Sawa’s parents and grandparents and aunt who are in Kyoto for the weekend. They had rented a van driven by a really interesting and knowledgable guide for the day, so we set off.

Our first stop was the place we’re having our wedding at, which they all loved. The garden there is so pretty, it’s gonna be great to have the wedding ceremony there! All day, and in fact all the time I’ve been in Kyoto pretty much any cool place I go they have amazing gardens. At Amherst, we made a big deal about our Japanese garden, but even the gardens in old houses like the utai teacher’s are often cooler, and at the temples they’re just ridiculous. The leaves are just starting to change too, so the first Japanese maple leaves are starting to turn scarlet, and it’s going to be gorgeous in a couple of weeks.

We also stopped by the Gion district, a first for me. That’s where all the geisha still do their business. We didn’t say any real ones today, but we did see three white girls doing the “dress up as a geisha” experience. It was very strange, especially seeing one maiko go by with a nose-ring.

After the wedding place and lunch at a yudoufu (tofu boiled in soy milk) place, we stopped at the Heian shrine, where some little kids were coming early for Shichi-Go-San, the festival for 7, 5 and 3 year olds. The kids are so cute in their traditional clothes! I think I want to come back next week just to see all them all dressed up.

Next we went to the Mashuin temple, which was really pretty. I’ve been to a bunch of temples so far, but usually I just go and look around and think “wow, this is ridiculously cool”. But this time the guide knew a lot of cool trivia that made it even more interesting, once Sawa translated it for me. For example, the reason they have a raised tatami mat in one corner and the roof is lower there is so people can’t stab the important person who sits there from below or above, because it’s too thick. It’s really cool to see how practical things like that evolved into art forms. Like, back at our wedding place, they had one of those cool shishiodoshi (bamboo things that fill with water until they overbalance, spill the water out and then return to their initial position with a “crack”, like the one in the garden battle in Kill Bill. The name literally means “scare-boar”, and it’s purpose is to scare away boars from fields, just like scare-crows, although it seems much more effective.

After that, we went to the Touji temple, which had this really awesome tower. This awesome architecture too has its roots in functional purposes, as it’s made to make it more flexible and resist earthquakes.

After that, we had some delicious but insanely overpriced coffee at the hotel and went to the restaurant for a delicious dinner. As always, Sawa’s parents and (especially this time) grandparents were way too nice to us and spoiled us with delicious food and kind words, but it was really delicious and fun.

Tomorrow were planning a more “local” sightseeing day checking out Sawa’s apartment and my dorm and the imperial palace next door.

We’re thinking that from now on Sawa’s going to try to be good about taking lots of photos and uploading them quickly so my blog can be enhanced by her great photos and she can have a publication outlet for her stuff, which is why today’s photos are so much better than past ones.