thefestivities

whatever else you can say about mysterious Japan, one thing is for certain: it is a land of festivals. called Matsuri, the Japanese seem to have a festival for everything. during our time here, we've had the chance to see several of them, even participating in some, and in more intimate ways than we could have imagined.

while some of them do seem to have a purpose, the first one we came across was distinctly inscrutable. late on a Sunday afternoon in early August, we were exploring our neighborhood on foot when we saw what looked like a small carnival going on in a local schoolyard. we looked on curiously, but rather than being turned away for being dirty foreigners, the men at the gate eagerly beckoned us in. on two sides of the schoolyard where various stalls, while in the middle was a stage of sorts, with a large Taiko drum and drummers next to it. i thought that some video might be the best way to appreciate these events:



as you can see, most of the women are wearing traditional kimono. this kind of dancing was going on the whole time we were there. below, me and the strange rice-goo balls that I was probably supposed to pay for.



we had a good time and probably stuck around for almost an hour taking pictures and enjoying the atmosphere. the folks there were very hospitable and tried to give us plenty of tea, which we politely declined, and some strange rice balls on a stick that i ate mainly because i was hungry. they did also give us a clue as to what they were all doing there: Jill and I were each handed a small pack of tissues which bore a sticker saying, among all the Japanese characters, PTA. so we assume it was some kind of fundraiser, even though i didn't pay for my rice goo.

just a couple of weeks later was the very important Japanese festival of O-bon. similar to Taiwan's Tomb Sweeping Day, which is held in April, O-bon is a Buddhist festival during which people return to their home towns in order to clean the graves of ancestors. it is celebrated widely and sometimes even wildly. in the Sakae area of Nagoya, the main street was closed down while various revelers formed a long procession along it. here again, some video:



dancers and bands making their way slowly along Hirokoji Dori in Sakae, Nagoya.



just like in Taiwan, the religions here have a tendency to get a bit mixed up, so though O-bon is a Buddhist festival, the celebrants still brought a fair share of Shinto tokens into it. at one point, we saw and followed the first and still the largest O-mikoshi we have seen. an O-mikoshi (really a Mikoshi—O is just an honorific prefix in this case and the case of Bon festival) is basically a portable shrine which is believed to serve as a vehicle for a deity. it is carried around, generally on shoulders, until it is returned to the local shrine. in this case, however, there were also some riders aboard:



later in the year, we had a much more intimate experience with an O-mikoshi at our local, town Fall Festival. on October 8, after returning from the Formula One Grand Prix at Suzuka, we were pretty beat and half sacked out in our house, when we heard strange chanting outside. running to see what was going on, we were suddenly enlightened as to why those lanterns had been hanging on the trees on our street: parading right past our front door was most of our neighborhood, complete with their own O-mikoshi. strangely enough, towards the back of the group was a lady who just happened to be an English teacher at a local high school, who invited us to join the procession.

we followed the group halfway around the neighborhood until they stopped for rest at a parking lot that this lady, Etsuko Ishihara, owned. there we were invited to eat and, later, to assist in carrying around the O-mikoshi. into both of these endeavors we embarked with great delight, the first turning out well, the second more questionably so. have a look at the video, and then i'll tell you all about it:



carrying the O-mikoshi with the Kamejima crew. the characters on the lanterns read, from top to bottom: Kame (turtle) Jima (island) Ni (two) Cho and me. two chome is the specific area of Kamejima in which we live. and yes, that is Jill laughing at me at the end of the clip. below, Jill and I pose with the rest of the neighborhood, O-mikoshi in the background. Etsuko, our translator and very gracious hostess during the festival, is sitting in the front row, second from the left.



i'm still not sure what Wa-shoi means, but we were expected to shout it nonetheless, so i did it dutifully. i'm sure i was given quite an honor to be able to help carry the O-mikoshi, for which I was dressed up in a "happi" coat and headband. it's just that that O-mikoshi was the heaviest thing i've ever encountered in my entire life. seriously. as you can see, it doesn't look that big, and there have to be about 16 guys bearing it up. it is framed in pretty solid wood, though the main housing section is simply a bunch of lanterns and a couple of batteries, so i don't know where all the weight comes from. heavy deity, i suppose. in any case, carrying my share of it on this night and a couple of times the following night, as the festival continued, really did my shoulder in for a good week or so. but that which doesn't kill us makes us stronger, and sometimes seemingly pointless struggles turn out to have a meaning. you may have noticed, in the video, a guy at the O-mikoshi's front, whose only seeming function was to retard its progress and divert it from a straight course. i have no idea what that was all about, but i do know there were times when i was ready to drop that thing right on him. so maybe Japanese things are a little inscrutable to me. even though i still don't really know why Kamejima Ni Chome was having a festival, i do know that we had a good time, and are glad to say we've done these things and had these experiences, and maybe that's what it's all about. it's what I'm going with for now.

zabesuboru

that's "thebaseball", for those of you who don't speak Japanese. and yes, they are pretty crazy about it over here, but in subtly different ways than folks in the States are. where being a fan at a baseball game is meant to be relaxing and enjoyable in America, the same avocation here carries serious responsibilities, naturally. you must not only know all the chants and songs used to rally your team, but you must sing them at the appropriate time, and in perfect unison with the other fans. likewise, your noise makers must only be banged or shaken in choreographed synchrony with everyone else. i'm not sure what the penalties for failure are, but they must be stiff, because we didn't notice anyone out of line. then again, we are lazy Americans, and probably incapable of such detection anyway.



the bright green astroturf of the famous Nagoya Dome, home to the champion Chunichi Dragons. here, however, they are getting beaten by the Hiroshima Carp in a playoff game. below, they had signs for most of the players when they got up to bat. i'm not making this unison stuff up.



in any case, the game we saw, with our friends Dale and Elise, was a bit of a snoozer, despite being in the playoffs. last year our local team, the Chunichi Dragons pretty much coasted to the national title (the game we saw was on October 5th), but not before being beaten quite handily by the Hiroshima Carp in this division series game. here in Japan, as in Taiwan, teams are often owned by companies, and so take their name. our local team in Taiwan was the Sinon Bulls, named after the Sinon grocery store chain, and the Dragons are owned by the Chunichi Shimbun--the Daily Chunichi newspaper. the big team in Tokyo, arch rival of the Dragons, is the Yomiuri Giants, owned by the Daily Yomiuri paper. i wouldn't have thought there were natural synergies between newspapers and baseball teams, but clearly they see something in it. maybe cheap stories? either way, you may be somewhat familiar with the Dragons as they were the team nominally featured in the 1992 Tom Selleck movie, Mr Baseball.

so it was a fun experience, something you have to do in Japan; after all, it's almost as much a national sport as sumo. the hot dogs are a bit dubious and you're just as likely to find yourself eating soybeans as peanuts, but the game is pretty true and it really is a trip to see and hear an entire stadium perfectly synchronized. it's too bad all that order doesn't persist when the game is over--behold the anarchic sea of head-down, no-eye-contact Japanese salarymen all heading for the subway station:

theholidays

as usual, it's been a while, but don't they always say better late than never? i'll go with that in order to feel good about bringing you some pictures from Thanksgiving and Christmas last year.

having grown up in Britain, without a specific day of "Thanksgiving", i've never really got into the idea. it's not that i don't like it, just that i don't expect it, so i don't feel like i'm missing anything if i don't get to celebrate it. having low expectations of a day is a pretty good way to do it, i think, because then any festivities seem like a bonus. this was doubly true in Japan, because who expects a turkey over here? there are enough Americans around, however, that a day without a bird would have caused some serious distress in the circles we move in. lucky for them that our friends the Stevensons, who are the Mission Presidents for the Japan Nagoya LDS Mission, decided to have a very comprehensive celebration at their place.


Thanksgiving, clockwise from top left: Jill and i after the stuffing; an inkling of the spread before the feeding; President and Sister Stevenson going the extra mile as hosts to pose with us for a picture; and an enormous plate of sushi brings Japan right into the celebration.

it was a great celebration, with all the traditional dishes and then some. most of the Americans didn't seem to want to taint their authentic experience with any outsider food, so i may have eaten about half of one of those sushi plates by myself; i know i took a good chunk of another one home in a plastic tub.

now a holiday that i did grow up appreciating is Christmas. this was my second Christmas in a foreign-seeming land, after spending it in Samoa a few years ago. here in Japan, the big holiday is the New Year, and Christmas seems to have been imported only to serve the needs of opportunistic marketers (sound familiar?). in any case, we worked our lame jobs (yes, lame: our Christmas "bonus" was a 310 yen box of cookies--that's about $2.70, folks) until the 23rd, and our Korea trip wasn't until the 27th, so we just settled in for a quiet and not very traditional Christmas. nevertheless, there do seem to be some things you can't go without: parties and stockings, to name a couple. fortunately, the wonderful Meito Ward provided the first, and even managed to find a Santa (who, curiously, was white) and a bag of treats for each attendee.



above, clockwise from top left: the Japanese girls love Santa; the feast at the ward Christmas party; thejayfather shows signs of regression, insisting on sitting on Santa's knee at the tender age of 27. Santa was played by our good friend Elder Marlowe; finally the man who prepared most of the grub, Bishop Iwata, a professional chef. in his arms is his daughter Hijiri, who really is just about as cute as can be. below, clockwise from top left: Jill and i sport our new Christmas pajamas while showing off our gift-surrounded Christmas twig. i mean tree; our bling bling watches, gifts from Elder Nelson and his friend DMX in Yonkers, NY; me using our Doraemon (a cartoon character here) stockings in a way they were not likely designed for; and ranch dressing, a godsend for Jill from my dad.



meanwhile, back at the house, Jill decorated with very anatomically awkward Doraemon stockings and a very Japanese (read "small") tree, which we surrounded with the many gifts sent us by friends and family around the world. during this time i was out scouring the local stores for matching pajama pants for the two of us, so we could continue a longstanding Nelson family tradition on Christmas Eve. needless to say, finding something to fit the bill was a lot more difficult that it might have been back at home, but isn't that what the holidays are all about? certainly, over here, we made the best of what we had and it all turned out very nicely, yet again.

thebirthday

after spending the day a my very crappy ex-job, i was all ready for a quiet night in with the wife for my recent birthday. at lunchtime she had given me an iPod shuffle, so i was planning to spend the evening loading it up with songs and seeing just how random it was.

but wouldn't you know, that wonderful woman had other plans for me, plans i should have figured out, but didn't even when they were all but happening. when i got home she told me we would be going out to dinner, which i'd half expected, but it seemed odd that we would have to leave at a certain time, as she informed me we would; after all, it's not like we can easily make reservations here. so when the appointed time came, she drove, or rather rode, us into town and turned down a side street i wasn't very familiar with. suddenly the penny dropped and i figured out that she'd found the awesome shabu-shabu restaurant we'd been to our first week here. but we kept on going and turning until we came right back out by the Hard Rock Cafe that we've been to so many times in search of filling, not to say Western, food.

oh well, i thought, shabu-shabu another time. but as i dismounted the bike a Japanese person passing by started talking to me--something that never happens here. except that i suddenly recognized her as our friend Megumi, a professional interpreter. all of a sudden i roused from my work-induced stupor and realized that Jill had set up a party with all of our friends from our so-called English Club--but i still hadn't figured out why.



Jill and i with my free balloons and birthday cake, and below with the English Club and the Hard Rock bear. from left: Kevin and Misty, Megumi, and the Marlowes.

the folks there at Hard Rock were very nice, taking pictures to make me a personalized badge and giving me a March 2007 Hard Rock birthday pin; they even had the whole place sing Happy Birthday to me. but it was something else Jill was after, something she wanted for herself. almost every time we've been there before, the staff get all the birthday boys and girls up on the little stage they have and make them do a special version of "YMCA", as in the video below:



the party having lifted my spirits immensely, i was actually feeling game to try this out when at last it had finally dawned on me that it was the whole reason we were there. unlike me, Jill isn't very into surprises for herself; she told me she wants to do her birthday at the Hard Rock so she can get up on stage, and that she wants an iPod shuffle, too. i'm inclined to make good on the latter request, since she was doubly disappointed that night: we determined we wouldn't still be here on her birthday, and for some reason they didn't even bother with the birthday YMCA. i enjoyed the whole thing anyway, sweetheart, and better luck next year...

the38th parallel

it's been a while (as usual), but now that thejayfather is gainfully unemployed again, i have some time to catch up on old posts, starting with our cool trip to Korea. i say cool, but what i really mean is cold--very cold. we left Japan a couple of days after Christmas and landed in Seoul during a cold snap that lasted almost exactly as long as we were there. the highest outdoor temperature we experienced was a numbing -4°C, or about 25°F. good thing we'd bought ourselves warm coats in China.



Jill and I outside the Seoul, Korea Temple. don't let the clothes fool you: it was freezing but she made me take off my hat for the picture. below, we kneel below the Munoas and the Greens after a wonderful Sunday dinner at their apartments.



our first order of business was to find the LDS Temple in Seoul, which we did with alarmingly good timing. we happened to make our way inside just in time for the session that was attended by the two missionary couples from the States who were working there. afterward, they volunteered to show us to church on Sunday and then feed us later. we got a very real sense that no matter where we go in the world there are people in the Church who are otherwise strangers that will be your instant friends. we were treated so well by the Munoas and the Greens and hope that we can pass on their kindnesses someday.

of course, Korea isn't all Sunday dinners and rapid socializing; it is a land split down the middle, rent in twain, divided against itself. to hear our Southern tour guides tell it, this division will not stand, but to see the physical split that runs between North and South--the DMZ, our second big destination--you could be forgiven for thinking it might. the actual border is halfway through the four-Kilometer wide De-militarized Zone, the outskirts of which are so heavily armored it seems a bit of a misnomer, and is kind of a no-man's land. Straddling the border is the village of Panmunjeom, where the UN conducts various negotiations between the sides, and just South of there sits Freedom village, where South Koreans are paid ridiculously high tax-free salaries to grow rice. it is supposed to be very good rice, however.



Jill stands on the South side of the DMZ, where hopeful Koreans have hung their wishes for a peaceful reunification with their poor Northern brothers. below, a view across the Zone shows the North's mighty flagpole and a few of the houses in Gijong, their propaganda village.



on the North's side of the great divide there is a large industrial complex and a huge tract of brand new houses--that are completely uninhabited except for the world's most powerful speakers. while the lights in the houses are turned on and off by remote switches to give the appearance that people live there, the speakers blast propaganda across the DMZ 12 hours a day to remind the poor Freedom Village workers of all they're missing out on by staying in the South. defect to the North, they say, and you can finally get an up close look at the world's tallest flagpole. some 160 meters (525 feet) tall, the flag it flies is an immense 275 Kilos (about 600 lbs), the world's largest, which title the South finally decided to stop challenging for a few years ago.

despite the seeming hostility, there remains a great deal of hope, at least on the South side, for reunification. indeed, the division is between governments, not people, and many on either side have relatives on the other. signs of this hope abound, like a spanking new railway line and station that we visited, and a shiny blacktop highway stretching far into the North which has been slowly opening up cross-border commerce since it was finished. but the omnipresent military police with their blockades and passport checks bring you back to the realities of the current situation. part of our tour was to go down in one of the six "infiltration tunnels" that soldiers from the North have tried to dig over the years, a pretty sobering experience given the number of troops that would have been able to move through there. also, across several of the roads back to Seoul stand what look like very tall bridges to nowhere. the "bridge" tops are around eight feet high and packed with explosives that will be blown if North Korean troops ever do make it across the Zone. the resulting wreckage of concrete that will be strewn across the roads is supposed to slow down an advancing army, giving Seoul up to an extra hour to prepare for its defense.

and Seoul needs to be defended; it's a huge city with about 10 million people in its metropolitan area. we spent our time there wandering among them in the (still freezing cold) markets and down their quite beautiful city canals and walkways, and of course at the obligatory palaces and temples.


Gyeongbokgung Palace views, clockwise from top left: the main gate; period costumed "soldiers" stand guard at the gate; the five-tiered square pagoda housing the National Folk Museum; and the impressive island Gyeonghoeru Pavilion. fortunately for me, i wasn't required to remove my hat for this picture--did i mention it was cold!

the one pictured above is Gyeongbokgung, the imperial palace, which is a vast and a very nice complex. it seems Korean traditional buildings borrow heavily from the design of their Chinese counterparts, but tend to favor green paint to blue. that was the main difference i detected, anyway. still, it was a nice site, well maintained and considerably cheaper than most of the stuff in Japan; plus, they had a bunch of guys dressed up in traditional guard costumes who even marched around a bit every ten minutes or so. they looked very authentic until i realized that what i had taken for a runny nose due to the cold was actually glue to hold on a fake moustache. i guess it doesn't pay to get too close.

anyway, we had a great time in Korea. it was pretty relaxed and a nice break from crappy work here in Japan. and besides, i've never felt so wealthy:



me with our foreign exchange hordes. these are Korean Won 10,000 notes, which are the highest denomination available and are roughly the equivalent of US $10. good thing stuff isn't too expensive here, or you'd really have a fat wallet. below, Jill points the way back home, just a short two-hour flight to Japan.