In the US

(Note: this was written on 24/5. Now I’m at Amherst and probably won’t update much until I’m back in Japan)

I’m writing this on the bus from JFk airport into Manhattan. It was a little weird arriving in the States and seeing lots of fat, non-Japanese people who speak English. It was also a little sad to look at signs and realize that all the English would actually make perfect sense and wouldn’t be hilarious, which is pretty much guaranteed anytime there’s an ad in Japan using English.

The plane flight was pretty uneventful. I finished my book “The Origins of Music”, slept, and decided to be really good and do all my grading and mid-term evaluations for my class now rather than waiting till I had to. This time I’m going to do a very different mid-term grading than I did last semester. Last semester I gave them the kind of grades they might have gotten at Amherst, maybe a little bit harsher, but I’ve learned that it’s no big deal to failup to about a third of your classes at Doshisha, so I think this time in order to actually scare them into working harder I’m going to give failing mid-term grades to about two=thirds of my students. Those are all the ones who haven’t really been volunteering to answer questions and present in class, which I explained at the beginning was the most important thing. I think they will understand and respond positively when I reinforce that active participation is the only real thing I’ll be a stickler about, and as long as they try they’ll pass whether or not they’re right. I think I’ve been nice enough and friendly enough that they’ll understand I’m not just being an asshole.

Last night, the night before I left, we went out for class karaoke with 18 of the students.

It worked at least as well as last time, maybe even better this time. Again, the students were all taken aback by how much Japanese I could actually speak and my singing “shibui” Japanese songs like Kiyoshi no souran bushi and Shimauta, and my ordering beer. I felt like it was a big bonding success, so it’ll be interesting how the combination of that followed by harsh mid-term grades when I return goes down.

Also, last Thursday my Machiya class went well. I taught them about rhyme like I had been teahing my Doshisha class, then we just kind of did sing-alongs with Beauty and the Beast and Amazing Grace with some teaching but mostly just singing. It was fun and they seemed to enjoy it and wanted to do more singing, which is god because I don’t really want to have to devise more intense educational classes like my Doshisha ones. It’s also fun to play piano again after a couple of years since I performed in public.

That evening we had our weekly movie night, where we watched a cute and very cheesy Taiwanese movie, “The Secret” starring Taiwanese heart-throb Jay Chou. Afterwards, me and Hayao and Ranbo went to a sento (Funaoka Onsen) for the first time since Nikyu and Junpei left. It was really nice. When I started a conversation with a random guy, it turned out that he had also lived in Amherst, spending a year at UMass. What a small world!

Now I’m on my way back to Amherst myself. I’m really excited.

Research

This morning I had my utai lesson, which went fairly well since I’ve been practicing a reasonable amount lately. In the afternoon I drafted out my letter to President Hatta and Dean Kuroki, which I’ll send tomorrow once I hear back from Prof. Morita whether he thinks it’s all good to send. I also read my music book a lot, corresponded with this professor who coedited the book and looked up his research. It seems really interesting and exactly in line with all the things I’ve been interested in lately – studying music comparatively in a scientific manner to link it up with genetic and linguistic data to trace the expansion of Austronesian peoples out of Taiwan. The only problem is this dude is based in Canada, and I don’t know if I really wanna go out there for a long period of time. Why can’t everyone who’s studying things I’m interested in be based in New Zealand or Japan? How inconvenient.

In the evening I had dinner with the parents of my friend Jimmy from the Zumbyes, who were in town for a family wedding. Unfortunately, we couldn’t go to me and Sawa’s favourite obanzai restaurant to take people to, Nanohana, because it’s closed on Wednesdays. We went to this place recommendd in my Zagat’s Kansai restaurant book, but although it was good it wasn’t as good as Nanohana and it was more expensive.

Oh, I also did a bunch of laundry in preparation for heading out to the states on Saturday!

Practising music again

This morning after practicing shamisen and talking with Sawa on Skype I had my first shamisen lesson in three weeks, and the first in about 2 months that I’ve actually practiced much for, since I’ve been so busy with wedding stuff. It felt really good to practice again over the last week, and I was surprised by how little I’d lost in the interim. If anything, I seemed better than before! Unfortunately, I won’t be able to practice for another two weeks while I’m in the States. I really really wanted to bring at least my shamisen with me to play over there, especially because I know the Zumbyes would love to jam on it, but I know it’s a terrible idea because a) I think the covering is cat skin and thus can’t ge through customs b) it would be unwieldy and undoubtedly break.

The rest of the day I stuck to my little schedule of things I need to do before I leave, which felt good. I planned my Thursday and Friday classes and then gave my room a good cleaning. In the evening we had our dorm meeting, and then we took Mariko out to eat ramen because it’s her birthday.

The dorm meeting was pretty quick. We’re in a difficult spot as far as the future dorm situation, because Doshisha just keeps refusing to give us anything concrete and keeps saying they won’t be able to deicde until next year. If we don’t get new students into the dorm by September, they won’t get a chance to live with the current ryosei and connect with that culture, but it looks like Doshisha probably won’t make up its mind before then. However, if we try to go ahead and just choose new members without their approval, they’ll use it as an excuse to say we’re bad and don’t deserve to have new members in the spring. It’s incredibly annoying how much the bureaucracy just stops any productive decisions from being made.

Tomorrow I’ll write this letter to President Hatta and the Dean of the International Office stating our position, then hopefully when I talk to Prof. Morse when I’m back in Amherst he can help clear up exactly what the plans are.

Gion Debut

Sorry it’s been a couple of days since I updated. Saturday I didn’t get back till late from my Gion Debut with the DAC (more info to follow), and Sunday was my Sabbath.

So, on Saturday I went to this DAC meeting at 1pm. It was a standard kind of AGM type-meeting. I actually kept up with most of the meeting information for the first hour and a half while they debated about how to honour Otis Cary, the old Amherst Professor who lived in and around the Amherst House for a long, long time. It was interesting to see for myself what the thoughts of the DAC were after being told by other people. As I had been told, they seemed to care more about preserving the history of the house and Prof. Cary then about the current state of the dorm and the Fellowship, although one person did ask me about where the fellow would be living next year and they did seem to want to help to make sure it continued. One thing they definitely had in common with the ryosei and many other people I’ve talked to about the situation is an anger at Pres. Hatta and the Doshisha administration about the lack of any kind of concrete plan about the future of the Amherst House, the Fellowship, or anything else for that matter. I don’t really understand how he was reelected with all the negative things I’ve been hearing, although when I asked Ranbo, he said that apparently the people who vote are only the professors, and that Pres. Hatta strategically sucked up to them by creatin all these new departments, thus creating new department chairships and things like that that improve their salary and prestige. Seems like a pretty broken system, if you ask me.

After the hour and a half AGM, there was about 2 hours of speeches by three DAC members about their recent activites. My Japanese brain was a little fried and I basically couldn’t follow them too much, but I did get the impression that these guys were serious balers. One guy was some kind of top journalist for the Asahi newspaper reporting on former Prime Minister Abe, one was in some kind of high position in Matsushita Denki, aka Panasonic, that kind of thing.

After that we went for a dinner, which was much livelier than the speeches, and I got to know a bunch of them. Then they all took me to Gion for my “Gion Debut”. It was quite a cultural experience.

It was kind of a cross between the dinner we had with Pres. Hatta and the geisha back in October, and going out on the town with a bunch of young guys. We went to some karaoke place that was either a “snack” or a “kyabakura” (cabaret club). Either way, basically these 10 or 12 50-60 year old businessman-types and me sat around being served drinks by four or five buxom young girls wearing low-cut dresses and singing karaoke.

The old elite guys being served by young girls thing was like the dinner with geisha, but this was definitely less of a reserved climate. I think this is what all Japanese businessman do after work. It was kind of a blast to do this once with all these old guys, but I really don’t think it would be that fun to do this all the time, especially knowing that the girls are just getting paid to make you have a good time. That seems like it would take all the fun out of it. Anyway, it was definitely a very informative window onto this part of Japanese culture.

The next day I slept nice and late, hung out with Mashu (who was around in the dorm for the weekend), and spent a couple of hours screwing around online after I found this application on Facebook to put in books you’re reading/have read/etc. I cant remember if I’ve said this already, but I totally love Facebook now. At first I thought it was so stupid, but after my friends in New Zealand started using it and I started connecting with all these old high school friends, and after I left Amherst and was able to keep in touch with all my Amherst friends, I became a convert. I also love all the new features it’s adding and the way it’s centralizing all social applications through it. This centralization of information is the same reason I’m in love with Wikipedia and YouTube and Google and the internet in general. Personally, I would love it if everyone in the world and every social application (messinging, Skype, photo sharing, event planning, group maiing lists, etc) ran itself through Facebook, although I realize there would be immense risks of abuse of information if there weren’t checks and competition.

While I’m on these issues of changing society, I thought I’ll put down some predictions I’ve been thinking about lately for what the world will be like in 50 years or so.

-The balance of power shifts from the US being a global hegemon to more of a balance between the US, the EU and India and China. In fact, if Asia as a whole (including India) keeps developing and manages to work together, I think maybe an “Asian Union” could become the dominant global power.

-Environmental problems and excessive population become the major issue, leading to the UN becoming more of a world governing body to limit population growth and environmental destruction multi-laterally.
-Some kind of sustainable energy production method becomes more economical than oil, changing geopolitics and economies.
-There is some kind of breakthrough in transportation (possibly involving giant efficient mass transportation conduits) making transportation of people and goods much easier – not as easy as transportation of information, but a lot closer.
Inter-racial marriages may change the face of racial politics, although that might only function within the small economic band that can afford international lifestyles.

So there you have it. The down-low from Patrick Nostradamus Savage.

That evening (Sunday), I sat down to plan out the coming week before I go to the states on Saturday. I realized I actually have quite a bit to take care of between now and then, but I think I have enough free time that given the steady but not excessively demanding schedule I gave myself I’ll get it all done before I leave. Today I was good and stuck to my schedule, getting a few of those things done (a bunch of small errands, clearing up my spouse visa application, practicing my music and almost finalizing the wedding party situation). I also played basketball tonight (oh yeah, and I did that Sunday night too) and as always when I play basketball, it feels great. I love basketball so much. I really think it is the best sport of all. Just the right amount of players to make coordinated teamwork crucial without having so many you don’t get much chance to participate or make much individual difference. I love the pace of the points and the amount of precision involved in using your hand to direct the ball, oh man I just love all of it. The only problem (and it’s a big one) is what a huge effect height and weight have on your basketball ability. If only that weren’t the case, it’d be perfect.

Oh, here’s a photo from the Aoi Matsuri that happened last Thursday.

It was hyped as one of Kyoto’s three major festivals (the other being the Jidai Matsuri and Gion Matsuri that I’ll be appearing in in July). However, honestly, it was a little underwhelming. If only they were playing music or chanting it would’ve been cool, but they were just walking in their costumes and they didn’t look very excited about it.

Oh yes, the other thing I’ve been doing a lot lately is reading my book “The Origins of Music”. I love it, it’s exactly the kind of scientific thinking about music in the broadest sense that I’ve been wanting to find out about. It’s a collection of articles, some of which are great and some of which are not so great, but reading the not-so-great ones is exciting because it shows me how much fertile unexplored or poorly-explored research areas there are for me to look into!

One worrying thing though: I found out that my idea about using a program to turn sound files into graphs already exists, and is used extensively in zoomusicology to analyze animal sounds. My idea of taking the ln of the frequency and superimposing a sort of Western staff over it still stands, but in reading about the mechanisms of the Fourier transform they use to turn the waveform into frequency, it seems that there’s an inherent frequency-time uncertainty trade-off that prevents the kind of highly detailed look at frequency AND time I want to analyze music. However, if our brains can do it no problem, I think there must be a way to get a program to do it more precisely than this program seems to be able to do. It looks like that’ll be a hurdle in my research plans, though.

Koto concert

I didn’t update last night because it got late and I had to get up early this morning for a meeting with Mr. Nishioka from the International Centre. I was a little worried that he’d be another horrible bureaucratic type, but he was actually pretty helpful. He let us know that he knew where we were coming from and that he was working as best he could within the bureaucracy, and didn’t promise anything, but it was nice to just have him say things straight to us, which is often hard to find in Japan.

Anyway, yesterday my new English class thing went well, and I finally practiced koto and noh again for the first time in probably a month, and planned my class for today.

My class today went pretty well. I had been worried after last week, but I think last week was just a fluke down day. Today they seemed to get into the idea of performing hip-hop (especially the guys, which is most of them). I realized while grading their homework yesterday that despite how long I’ve spent on rhyming, almost none of them get the idea of writing their own original rhymes to Beauty and the Beast, so I explained again in painful detail and this week I’m having them retry one last time.

Oh, yesterday we had our movie night. We were going to watch Rashomon, but since they didn’t have it at Tsutaya, we watched Miyamoto Musashi. It was pretty bad-ass, a classic manly Japanese samurai movie of this samurai who all the girls swoon over but is so manly that he breaks all their hearts by wanting to run around and fight people and then run away into the wilderness rather than being all romantic. Very cool.

This evening I went to the koto concert I’ve been worrying about selling tickets for for a while. In the end, I only had to pay for three of the tickets myself (total = ¥10500), which was more than offset by the ridiculous pay I was given for checking the English club news. The concert was really very impressive. The coolest part was the shakuhachi player who played with my teacher, John Kaizan Neptune. He’s this white guy who’s awesome at the shakuhachi and mixes a lot of jazz style and progressive musical experimentation in with the traditional shakuhachi sound. He did some cool improvisation stuff and played a jew’s harp and his own taiko and arranged Take 5 for three koto, shakuhachi and percussion, as well as original compositions in a more Japanese style. Afterwards I was made to help clean up, but it wasn’t very bad at all and I got free left-over flowers for my trouble, to brighten up our dorm.

I’m pretty exhausted from the long day and having to get up early for this meeting, so I’m gonna crash. Oyasumi!

The elusive DAC

Today I had my noh lesson in the morning, which went pretty well. I’ve definitely internalized a lot of the idioms that were so confusing when I first started, even though I really haven’t been practicing very much at all.

I spent a bunch of the afternoon worrying about this English class tomorrow with the young kids and old people, not being able to find someone to help take the kids or think of what to do with the older ones. But, later in the evening as I was simultaneously worrying about it but not making any actual progress, this guy who said he probably couldn’t help said he could after all, and I thought of a good thing to teach them using maps of Kyoto and working on directions, so once I get through this I think it’ll be good.

Oh, in the afternoon I met briefly with the leader of the DAC (Doshisha Amherst Club) whose nickname is “Masan”. I had heard quite a bit about the DAC, but all vague information and it sounded like they were a little weird. This was the first time I’d had any contact with them. He invited me to this party they were having this Saturday. It was lucky for both of us that I was free, because he did ask very late but kind of said that it was something the Amherst Fellow always has to do every year. However, he was very nice and friendly and apparently all the DAC members are very well connected, which always comes in handy. They’re the alums of the Amherst House before there was a big change and new more radical students took over. Apparently, when the DAC people were there only people with top grades could enter the house, which maybe explains why they’re so well-connected now. Anyway, I’m going to go to some yearly event, read some English, schmooze with them and have some food.

Since they invited me at the last minute, I didn’t feel bad about an idea I had while we were chatting – inviting him and the other DAC people to the koto concert! I realized there’s really no way university students are going to pay ¥3500 for a concert for someone they’ve never heard of, so I realized my only chance was old people. On the spot, Masan bought not one but two tickets! Plus, he gave me the email address for the DAC group, so I’m hoping someone will come through for me. Only three more tickets to sell! Oh, and it turns out I’m getting paid ¥20,000 (!!!) just for my couple hours of work checkin that English, so I’m feeling much better about my finances right now.

In the evening I checked out the schedule for the alumni reunion, which I’m very excited about. There a bunch of seminars about things I’ve gotten very interested in lately – environment, globalization, legacies of colonialism, the future of liberal arts education, etc (OK, I realize I’m not alone in these) Anyway, I’m very excited to be back at Amherst, see all the old places and eat old foods and talk with old professors and hang out with old friends, especially the Zumbyes! Not to mention, of course, the main event: our wedding celebration with all the family and friends. Oh man, this is gonna be great!

Harmony of happy tastes

Today I felt a strange sense of freedom, and realized it was because for the first time in a while I was mostly on my own. Of course I miss Sawa, but it’s also a little nice to just have a little time on my own, which I haven’t really had since the wedding. I’ve always been leading around or meeting up with family or friends and doing fun things. It was all fun stuff that wasn’t a burden at all, but I realized that just constantly being around people and having to chat and never just getting to be on my own drinking some coffee and chilling out is draining in its own way. I’m sure with a couple of days of this I’ll long for more company, but for today it was really relaxing to not have to interact much with people, even though I was still busy all day.

I slept for a solid 8 or 9 hours in the morning, got back to my old routine of going to get water and pray at Nashinoki shrine, then having some butter and miso toast and reading the NY Times over coffee (I didn’t want to go straight back to making miso soup and rice, but I might start that tomorrow). I then did a load of laundry for what must have been the first time in two or three weeks. I don’t know how I lasted so long…

I then went to meet up with Morita-sensei to go meet the new Section Chief of the International Centre, who I’ll be going back to meet with on Friday with Ranbo and maybe Hayao. Today was just to go say hi and get to know him – on Friday we’re going to be talking more about the future of the Friend Peace House/ I get the slight feeling that although he’s nice-ish, he wasn’t amazingly nice, and he might not be inclined to agree with our thoughts on what needs to be done. Oh well, there’s nothing to do but try.

In the afternoon, I finally got down to checking/editing these translations that Takada-san sent me for inclusion in his English News publication. It’s actually pretty ridiculous – if I remember right, I’m going to get paid about ¥15000 for the three or so hours it took me. Well, maybe I might have to put that towards these friggin koto recital tickets. (I did get one more older acquaintance to take one off my hands, though, but no one from Full House has responded yet to my plea.)

I took a break from my editing to go to Bimota with Hayao. It was amazing, as usual. I think that Bimota will forever have a special place in my heart even after I leave Japan, and Shoji, who runs it, feels like my uncle here in Japan, smiling benevolently as he provides a brief burst of happiness through cheap, delicious food every other day or so.

After finishing, I really wanted to reward myself with a bowl of coffee, but I stopped myself, because the last time I got into the routine of having 4 big bowls of coffee a day and getting decent sleep, I had trouble getting to sleep. Instead, I resolved a little while back to switch to maccha (powdered green tea) after dinner time, now that Loren gave me some good maccha and we picked up a chasen (maccha whisk) when she was here. Today was the first day I really followed this, and I’m glad I did, because it tasted delicious and I think I’ll be fine getting to sleep.

Oh man, between, home-made lattes during the day, Bimota for dinner and maccha in the evening, I have such a pleasant array of delicious and happiness-inducing things to keep me going through the day.

Tomorrow after my noh lesson (which I need to do some last-minute practice for) I’m supposed to meet with this alum from Amherst House from way back and then I need to figure out what the hell I’m gonna do about this English class I teach on Thursday with the class of small children and housewives with wildly varying levels of English.

On my own

Once again, I missed out about a week of blogging because I was extremely busy. I think looking at the frequency of my blog posts is a pretty good way of getting a sense of when I’ve been the most busy.

Today Sawa left to go back to Yokohama, and from there she’s going on to the States to help with some of the editing on her documentary job in New York, then I’ll meet her over there in two weeks and we’ll go to Amherst as we’ve been planning to have our US wedding celebration and go to Commencement and Reunion and revisit all our old stomping grounds. Also, this morning, William left to go back to the States. He’s came over here around the same time I did and has been teaching English and the three of us have been a kind of Amherst core in Kyoto, so it’s kind of the end of an era.

Since Sawa was only in Kyoto for a few days, we were busy taking care of all kinds of errands, including applying for my spouse visa. I also had my class on Friday, went rice planting on Saturday with Kimura-san, and spent a big last day in Kyoto with William on Sunday, so I think now I’m finally going to have two weeks of relative calm before going to the States. Of course, I’ll actually have a lot to do, but I think I will have a little chance to catch my breath.

Let’s see, let me recap some of the highlights of the last week or so…

Last Wednesday, the day after Sawa and I got back from Yokohama, Mashu was in town and we all went to the Chionin temple. Here’s a photo of us before we headed out.

It was really cool – they had a monk chanting and banging cool instruments, which I haven’t seen at any other temples except for the monk in Kumano. While we were there, there was a big commotion because there was a fire somewhere in the back of the temple, I think in the woods behind the complex. I think they got it out before it did much damage, but it was the first time I’ve ever sign fire-fighters in action. It was kind of scary.

Last Thursday I got my first chance to participate in the Thursday night Full House movie night we started this semester. It was my turn to choose the movie, so I chose Whale Rider, and it was a huge success. At first, it looked like it’d be a failure, because only me, Ranbo and this girl Emu from Richards House showed up. Oh, and this weird old lady who was leaving a haiku meeting when we were setting up and invited herself along. We were worried it’d be weird, but it was actually fine.

Anyway, we got some beer and snacks and settled down to watch it in the lovely pre-summer evening, and gradually cool people trickled along over the course of the movie and we were having a great time and ended up turning it into a double header, although I had to bow out to plan my class for the next day. It should only get better as the weather gets hotter and the nights better for hanging out outside. We had Ranbo’s projector set up to project against the wall and it was just like an outdoor movie theatre or something.

My class went reasonably well. I was teaching them about rap, and I liked the contrast between the Beauty and the Beast song we started with and Tupac and Dr. Dre rapping California Love. The class was a little reserved, which hopefully was just a one-off thing. I am a little worried that the high guy:girl ratio this semester will just mean the class is not as willing to participate and won’t work as hard, since that was my experience with the majority of the guys in the last class, but we’ll see. A couple of the guys seemed to be into the idea of learning how to rap. Next week I’m going to have them all take turns rapping on their own, and see how they do with the rhythm and pronunciation.

Oh, I found out that Ranbo has a month pass to go out to the Kyo-Tanabe campus, but he doesn’t need it on Fridays, so this semester I can use his pass for free and save myself the ¥1320 round trip fee to get the train out to teach my class.

Another big worry for me is my koto teacher’s concert coming up next Friday. Apparently, there is this tradition in Japan that students have to sell tickets for their teachers’ concerts. Not only do they just have to sell them – if they don’t sell them they have to buy them themselves! I was pretty sketched out at first and Sawa didn’t believe it was a real custom, but many people I’ve talked to say that’s the way it’s done in at least certain areas in Japan. It’s pretty rough in this case, because the tickets are really expensive – ¥3500 – which is way more than most people would pay for a non-superstar, and way more than most people I know can afford. I’ve managed to sell 3 to Takada-san and Morita-sensei and his wife, and my plan is to try to convince the people in the Full House dorm area to all come see it as a kind of cultural evening, but I really don’t know if I’ll be able to do it. I really feel like I shouldn’t have to pay that much money if I can’t sell them, but I guess I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.

Oh, I had some good news – apparently Fujikawa-san was made an honorary member of the Class of 2008! I wrote a little blurb about her that I think Chris read when the award was given (in absentia). Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to get through to talk to her about it, and I don’t even know if she’s definitely heard about it yet. Just for the record, I’m putting it in this blog:

Ever since she started working as the caretaker of the Amherst Guest House 20 years ago at Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan, Fujikawa-san has dedicated her work to building the relationship between Amherst and Doshisha. Doshisha was founded by Nijima Jo, aka Joseph Hardy Neesima, Amherst College Class of 1870, whose portrait hangs opposite Calvin Coolidge’s in Johnson Chapel. Through the years, as Doshisha’s bureaucracy fumbled, Fujikawa-san took it upon herself to coordinate the reciprocal Fellowships between the colleges and organize inter-college exchanges, although it was not her job. Despite all this, however, she has never once got a chance to visit Amherst.
Tragically, last September Fujikawa-san was diagnosed with inoperable cancer. Although her immune system is too weak to travel to Amherst to receive the award in person, Fujikawa-san is still as passionate as ever about improving the relationship between the two colleges and never misses a chance to talk about her ideas. In the words of the haiku inscribed beneath Joseph Neesima’s portait, may this award, like Fujikawa-san herself, act as (“yuuai no/ hikari no yadori/ umi koete”) “a dwelling place/ for the light of friendship/ crossing over the sea”.

Oh, back to the rice planting. Here’s us getting ready to start.

It was totally awesome, even though after a couple of weeks of great weather it was suddenly pouring with rain and freezing cold and we were barefoot in a wet muddy rice field. In fact, like many such bad experiences, it made it that much more better and more memorable in retrospect. Two hours into the planting we were only about a third done at most and were extremely wet and cold and dispirited, so we took a break to warm up and have some food. Here’s me loving the ramen.

One guy bailed out and to be honest I was kind of hoping everyone else would want to also. However, when we restarted, we somehow just started balling hard and just zoomed through the rest of the planting.

It was something I’ve wanted to do since I came to Japan, or even before. I especially wanted to do it after watching The Seven Samurai and seeing them planting rice and singing at the end. I had been planning to learn the song they sang and sing it with Kimura-san and the others while we planted, but I didn’t have time. However, we sang a couple of random songs, and I sang the New Zealand national anthem and they liked it, so we decided to make up our own rice planting lyrics for it since we didn’t have the rice planting song from the Seven Samurai. Here is is:

haru no hi taue Rice planting on a spring day
hayaoki mendoukuse~ Waking up early sucks
onaka ga suita I’m hungry
youfuku nureta And my clothes are soaked
ashita ha nichiyoubi Tomorrow is Sunday
ookome tabetara omoidasu When we eat a big feast of rice we’ll remember
minna no One Purpose Our “One Purpose” (the Doshisha college song we sang)
ame no hi taue Rice planting on a rainy day

Great success!

After the rice planting, we were tired but felt great. It’s hard to see them, but if you look closely in this photo you can see the tips of the seedlings lined up down the field.

The best part was, we then went to this luxurious onsen, washed all the mud off and soaked in the natural hot springs and warmed ourselves up. It was amazing. My legs are hella sore right now though. (By the way, the blue tinge in the photos is because something’s gone weird with my camera… I think I’ve bumped/dropped it one too many times with all my photo action in Japan.)

I then rushed back to this nomikai with the basketball team to welcome all the new members (there are 70 new first year students! Over 100 students in the club in total!)

On Sunday, Sawa, William and I saw this exhibit of an incredibly luxurious series of brocades illustrating the Tale of Genji. Apparently, it took this guy 37 years to make. This seems a little ridiculous to me, but he did live till he was 105, so I guess he’d already done plenty before he decided to embark on the project. We had a delicious meal at Nanohana and then hung out in the dorm with my dorm mates for William’s final evening in Japan. They decided to give Ranbo a late birthday cake, and we were talking about how Junpei and Nikyuu had smashed a cake in my face back near my birthday last June, so I decided to do the same for Ranbo as best I could with the materials I had at hand – peanut butter.

Oh, here’s another photo from the wedding. I just keep addin’ em to the pile… This one is one Daisy took with her film camera.

Back from Yokohama

(Note: I wrote this on the 6th of May, but didn’t get a chance to upload it until now (the 7th))

Well, another week zoomed by. It was much more relaxing than the last couple, and I caught up on a bunch of sleep, but it was actually moderately busy.

After spending all of Friday at home sleeping in, catching up on massive amounts of old email, updating this blog, and helping Sawa make this delicious steak dinner,

I met up with mum in Tokyo on Saturday afternoon and we had a nice couple of hours to just chat together.

I did the same on Sunday evening with Kel, and in both cases it was really great, especially since even though we all saw each other the week before at the wedding, I was so busy organizing and leading everything and everyone there was no time for relaxed one-on-one conversations.

Anyway, on Saturday evening I went to the wedding after-party of my friend Satoko, who I met about 8 years ago when I went on my high-school’s exchange to Yamamura.

It was good to see her again and meet some new Japanese people. It was striking how different the vibe was with all the friends being around 26/27 as opposed to 22/23 at me and Sawa’s wedding. Certainly, there were other factors too, but I got the sense that this was just one of many weddings they were all going to and wasn’t really that special for a lot of them, whereas me and Sawa being so early got in while everyone is still amazed at the thought of their friends getting married.

On Sunday, Mum and I met Kel at the airport, as did Eriko’s parents. Eriko homestayed with us just before I left for university, and Kel stayed at her place the following year on the same Onslow-Yamamura exchange I went on. We all had lunch, then split off to have the afore-mentioned long chat and then meet up wih a couple of Kel’s acquaintances from Yamamura.

The next morning we actually met up for lunch with Eriko herself, as well her new boyfriend, her sister and her parents, then went out to karaoke with just us young-uns. Sawa joined us later.

Eriko’s new boyfriend was pretty cool, and good at singing English. Here’s him getting really into a Korn song.

That evening Kel, mum, Sawa, her parents and I all met up at the airport for Chinese food and to see Kel off.

Today (Tuesday), Sawa and I went to meet a couple of people who weren’t able to make it to the wedding: her neighbour, Misao, and her mother’s aunt. uncle and cousin. Here’s Sawa’s great-aunt and her amazing chemical-lab style coffee machine.

Like all of Sawa’s family, they were incredibly nice and hospitable and gave each other elaborate gifts and us a huge lunch of amazing quality sushi and kept saying it was just a light snack. With that and some shopping we did later in the day to return gifts for people who gave US wedding gifts because they couldn’t make it to the wedding, I started being overcome by the hilarity of the gift-giving cold war that develops in Japan. The night before my mum had brought a present of chocolates for Sawa’s parents simply because she was afraid that they’d bring HER a gift and she’d be empty-handed, since last time our familys met Sawa’s family brought my family all these flowers and presents – to thank us for doing them the kindness of staying for free in their apartment I guess?! I think it’s very nice how thoughtful people are, and it’s definitely preferable I think to the brisk efficiency of some aspects of US culture, but sometimes it gets a little ridiculous and I wish people would just have a beer and hug each other violently and play some cricket like they would in New Zealand. Speaking of which, I should’ve picked up a souvenir (omiyage) for the ryosei, since it’s basically obligatory to bring a souvenir back if you go anywhere in Japan. Whoops. Oh well, apparently they often have stores in some train stations specifically for the purpose of buying regional goods as souvenirs that you forgot to get while you were in the area (or sometimes, of areas that people never went to at all, because they were having an affair with someone and only pretending to be away)

OK, to finish the update, here’re a few photos from my mum of the wedding and post-wedding period:

Kel and Dad pre-wedding

Me and Sawa re-entering in Western garb

The new family all together at the lunch the day after the wedding

My family at Kinkakuji (the Golden Pavillion)

Climbing Daimonji, minutes too late for the full sunset ☹

At okonomiyaki in Hiroshima, unaware of the drama of the lost taxi that would unfold soon.

At a greatly expanded English club lunch

Some class members at our first experimental English class in the old Kyoto machiya

My hard-won photo from the maid cafe

The ladies are well-coordinated with the cherry blossom motif

After the wedding (an excellent movie, by the way)

OK, as I said the wedding was awesome. I had kind of hoped that after the wedding things would be all relaxed, but really I knew that showing around as much as 20 people at a time would be a bit of a challenge. It was all relaxing in a sense though, as I was so psyched that the wedding went well and that they could all come, and it really was a great pleasure to show a bunch of my family and some friends around my new home and teach them all about this new place. It was interesting because I guess I still think of myself as being quite a foreigner here, but I forgot how much more Japanese I’ve become in my habits, from the way I act in social settings, to automatically taking off my shoes and pointing them back out, to the food I eat, and seeing all my family and friends who were here for the first time reminded me of that.

We pounded through all kinds of activities and sight-seeing at an unbelievable rate – here’s just a list of the major highlights:

On the Friday before my wedding I took 16 people on the 1.5hr one-way commute to Kyo-tanabe to help me teach my class. It was really a huge success – it seemed like the students and my family had a great time. I love it when you can make decisions that minimize the amount of work you do and maximize the good effects, like focusing the class around my family just chatting and doing activities with the students.

Afterwards, we missioned into Osaka to catch the last of the late-blooming cherry blossoms at the mint. I love some of these signs we saw throughout our train trips.

Throughout the following week, we saw the Kiyomizu, Kinkakuji, Ryoanji and Sanjuusengendo temples,

(Granny and Aunt Ruth getting a jinrikisha ride up to Kiyomizu temple)

went to the Miyako odori geisha show in Gion, complete with ridiculously false advertised “tea ceremony” where they herd 80 people into a room, and feed them through an assembly line of maccha and snacks, climbed Mt. Daimonji, had three lunches with various English clubs, ate kaiten zushi (conveyor belt sushi – the bullet train that brings out the special orders was a real hit with everyone we took), went on a day trip to Hiroshima/Miyajima,

where we lost a taxi full of septua/octogenarians and me and my Uncle David had to make a frantic 4-minute sprint through the train station to just BARELY catch the train they had slipped on and avoid an unplanned all-nighter in Hiroshima; and went to public baths.

We also went on a two-day trip to Yokohama/Tokyo, where we woke up at 4am to go to the fish market to eat fresh sushi,

Me and Dad trying to catch up on lost sleep

went to a maid café where Feet, Ollie challenged french-maid outfit-clad hostesses to beer-drinking, curry-eating and skanky juice-drinking challenges, respectively, and won two out of three.

And did some other Tokyo sight-seeing like going to this drum museum in Asakusa

Sawa leading the way

With everyone thoroughly exhausted, I saw most of my remaining family off to the airport on Sunday, but Ollie, Feet and I still had business to attend to since we were on our last night in Tokyo: partying all-night in Tokyo. We had initially planned to go to Roppongi, but changed our mind when we realized that we’d just party with foreigners in Roppongi, but could party with Japanese in Shibuya.

After a brief check-in on my remaining relatives at Sawa’s grandparents apartment, I met back up with them at the Hachiko statue in Shibuya. (My parents and Aunt Ruth and Harry Coyle somehow managed to turn the heater on super-hot, get an error message on the washer, not work the stove or microwave and accidentally fill a bath while I was gone. To be fair, I probably would’ve done the same, and could only fix about half of the problems) By that time they’d already picked up these two girls Chika and Miyo at some party they got corralled into going to because they were foreigners (plus some random other girl in this photo).

We went off and played pool with them for a while and almost managed to string out the game long enough for them to miss the last train, but we were just too awesome and they just made their train. Unsure of what to do next and surpised by the suddenly strangely quiet streets, we cracked open some One Cup sake back at the Hachiko statue.

Bad idea. It really didn’t go at all well with the beer we’d had at the pool hall.

However, it was good because there were two random Japanese people at the statue, and after we got them to take our picture and then had a drink with them, they took us to meet their crew and we all went to some random izakaya, where we proceeded to have an epic night. Feet seemed to manage to get through the night without problems, but between the alcohol and exhaustion and lack of sleep, I spent most of the evening asleep or almost asleep, and the sake didn’t agree with Ollie very well and he was hurting by the end of the night, and for that matter the next morning, when we got up after an hour and a half of sleep to catch a bullet train back to Kyoto, where I saw off my Dad. (My mum stayed in Tokyo and Ruth and Harry are spending one more week on their own in Kyoto).

With my family all safely back in their various places or left to their own devices, I turned my attention to hanging out with Feet and Ollie for their last two days. After a much-needed recovery sleep, we went to USJ on Tuesday with the free tickets they won at the wedding after-party.

The next day, we had some nice sleep and lunch at Bimota, and then me and Feet went to get an old-school style wet shave, which he was extremely excited about.

With all the hecticness leading up to the wedding and beyond, it almost felt like I fast-forwarded through spring, and now on Tuesday and Wednesday two scorching days made it feel like it was already summer. On Wednesday we borrowed some bikes and biked up the Kamogawa river to this spot Rambo told me about. We were going to jump off the dam, but got a little sketched out and instead just swam and climbed around.

Refreshed, we continued on North, getting steeper and steeper, all the way to the Kurama Onsen that Andy Xie, a Doshisha Fellow from a couple of years back, told me about. It was really nice to finish the long uphill bike ride and get to this steaming natural hot spring and watch the sun go down over the hills from within.

After a much easier downhill ride back, we went to grab ramen at Takumi (down Imadegawa a block or two past Demachiyanagi Station) with Ranbo and Mariko for our last night, then they packed and grabbed a few hours of sleep before we woke up at 6am this morning to get them to the airport. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much meat in a bowl meant for one person before.

Haha, now, though, I had about 4 or 5 hours to just relax and catch up on some stuff, and then I hopped on a bullet train to Yokohama. My Uncle David had arrived one day later than the rest because of a last-minute health scare and he had got an extra-long JR rail pass anyway, so his pass was still good till today, so I used it to get a free ride back to Yokohama, where I needed to come for an old friend’s wedding after-party and to meet my mum and brother again, as well as to see Sawa and her family and meet some of her other relatives I still haven’t met.

I’m pretty exhausted from all the planning and marrying and guiding and organizing and traveling and partying, but it’s a wonderful, happy, fulfilling kind of exhaustion and it was an incredible amount of fun and happiness to have all these people I love come share in our joyful day and have a great time here.

By the way, before the wedding, we took Sawa’s mum to Bimota for the first time and Shibe came along.

Throughout the post-wedding fun, I got all my family to check out Bimota at least once. Here’s Shoji, the owner.

Also, during the first week after the wedding, Ollie and Feet were largely on their own while I showed my family around, but they seemed to get along great with the ryosei. Here they took part in the weekly movie nights we’ve started this semester, and they even made everyone some New Zealand pavlova!

Oh, in other news, I should mention a couple of things more related to my “official” Doshihsa fellow business. First, I obviously haven’t had any time to study Japanese or practice music, although I did do a great job of getting through my lessons despite no practice (my teacher was very understanding). I did get a tiny bit of time to read, though, and I found this amazing book that is everything I’ve been wanting to learn about but haven’t found. It’s called “The Origins of Music”, and claims to be the foundational volume of the field of “evolutionary musicology”, a sub-field of “biomusicology”, which I’ve realized is exactly what it is that I want to study: music and its relation to humanity from a scientific perspective. Not only is it really interesting and exciting, but although I had feared that I might find that someone had already thought of my idea of creating a musical notation system graphing sound files, no one seems to have thought of it the way I have, although people have said something like “briding the gap between acoustic files and traditional Western notation will be a main challenge that will reveal lots of important data.” That’s what my system does! I’m so excited!

In between all the craziness, I managed to fit a couple of discussion with the ryosei and with Morita-sensei about the future of the Fellowship. It’s looking a little bleak right now. Despite seeming to make some progress arranging meetings with important people at the end of last semester, suddenly they stopped replying to us and even to Morita-sensei. Apparently, discussions have moved up to the top level between universities and, in what seems to be typical Japanese fashion, there isn’t a lot of room for input from the lower levels. The plan now is to keep trying to meet with these people, but at the same time to write down our position, send it to them, and try to schedule my own meetings with the ones making decisions back at Amherst for when I go back there in a month, and just see how we go.

Finally, I had my first class of this new “Machiya Circle” thing. It was a good thing I brought my family along, because I didn’t exactly know what to expect or what to do, and on my own there is NO WAY I could have taught 10 50-odd-year-olds and 10 6-year olds at the same time. I’m going to have to talk to the organizers and get another teacher to teach one group while I teach the other, then combine them for 10-15 minutes at the end to sing a song or something, because it’s just not going to work to try to teach all of them for a whole hour lesson.

Whew, I think that’s it for now. Now that the huge crunch is over, I think I’ll get back on a decently regular updating schedule.

Life is good.

Wedding!!!!!!!!!!!

My life has now changed forever – I am now a married man, and a damn happy one at that. The wedding went absolutely wonderfully – about as well as I could have hoped. I think we got a really good mix of doing it traditionally and giving it our own flavour. Even the weather, which we had no chance of controlling, cooperated – for two days before the wedding it was pouring with rain, then on the morning there were just some grey clouds and apparently as the ceremony began, the clouds burst open and sunlight poured in and butterflies flitted around. I’m not a very supernatural person, but I’m pretty sure that’s a friggin’ good omen. I feel confident that our marriage will be like global warming – there will be some cylical variation and noise, but overall the amount of awesomeness will keep increasing more and more rapidly. (Athough in the case of global warming it’s not awesomeness that increases but temperature and devastation to ourselves and our planet.) Best of all, it was so great so much of me and Sawa’s family and friends came from all over Japan and the world were able to come and share in it, and we both talked through what the vows were that we would be taking and came up with some good ones that were very important to us.

Here are some pics from the wedding. These are mostly ones that my friend James McPheat (hereinafter referred to as Feet), Priscilla, and a few other friends took – we’re still waiting for the ones from the official photographer):

The highlight of the ceremony: my brother Kelly and Sawa exchanging me and Kelly’s 20-second secret handshake as brother and sister-in-law.

Putting on the ring (mine was really hard to get on and I looked silly)

Cutting the cake

First bite

Me and Sawa singing “Come What May” karaoke-style at the end of the reception.

My Dad looked like this for pretty much the whole wedding.

Cutting a NEW cake at the after-party (in Japan they usually have an after-party for friends, since there’s usually not room to invite them all to the wedding itself)

Out of the way, Ollie!

All kinds of great people: my brother, friends from NZ and from the dorm

My brother singing karaoke at the after-after-party with one of my students from last semester, who now lives next door! (She was a great student, which is good, because it’d be awkward if she wasn’t)

A bunch of them at the after-after-AFTER-party (fortunately me and Sawa bailed out in the middle of the after-after-party to go to the ryokan I had booked for our wedding night)

The other really great thing about the whole wedding thingey was that my family and Sawa’s family seemed to get along great. In addition to the wedding, we had a lunch for just the families the following day and my family took Sawa’s family out to dinner in Yokohama as a thank-you for letting us stay in their gorgeous apartment and everything else they’ve done. The wedding was actually the first time my Dad met either of Sawa’s parents, so I was a little worried, but they hit it off great.

My dad and Sawa’s dad especially seem to share some common personality traits and I had suspected before that they would like each other. They were all excitedly planning out an itinerary involving lots of tramping for next January, when Sawa’s parents will come to NZ for a week to celebrate the wedding there and see the sights.

I’ll put all the other stuff besides the wedding in the next post.

(old post from April 17th)

(Note: I wrote this part on April 17th but didn’t have the chance to upload it till now (May 1st!)

Once again, it’s been a while since I posted, but I’ve had a couple of small things I had to attend to: you know, a wedding to plan,18 relatives and 2 friends from the US and New Zealand to see safely into place and make sure they don’t get lost in Japan, small things like that. Actually, the only reason I have any time to write this now is that I have to spend all day at the airport collecting people as they fly in and sending them on their way into Kyoto, so I physically can’t be attending to things in Kyoto. I’m actually very glad of this.

Yesterday Sawa and I spent the whole day finishing off the last details of the wedding (with breaks for food and picking up my friends Ollie and James from the train station). I couldn’t believe it when I finished and suddenly there was nothing else I needed to do for the wedding. Of course, today I was running around frantically throughout the morning and afternoon picking up family, getting them set up in their accommodation, getting them on their way to see this Geisha dance performance (miyako odori) with tea ceremony, etc. There will be a lot more of that to come, but it’ll all be fun, and once the wedding goes smoothly (I hope) I’ll be able to focus on that and not be very stressed out, and we’ll all have a great time. I really am very excited about this and so glad so many family and friends came to visit, it’s just a tad overwhelming trying to coordinate everything at this crunch point right before the wedding. Haha, oh yeah, and tomorrow I’m taking all 20 of them along with me to my class, teaching the class, then we’re all going into Osaka to check out the cherry blossoms at the zouheikyoku (Mint? Anyway, the place they print money), as they apparently have a huge variety and they bloom late. Then, go to sleep, wake up, and get married!

Oh, the only other thing of note I’ve done in the last few days was go to the first basketball practice of the year with my club (Intensity). It was really fun to play again after not playing or doing any other very intense exercise of any kind for about 4 months! I’m really excited about practicing regularly with them this season, and hopefully playing some real games too. I’m also going to at least have a try at this taiko group next week and see whether I want to and am able to join them this semester.