Between a Rock and a Wet Place

9/13
In the morning, I woke up to fireworks. Because of the matsuri, the tengu - a long nosed, red faced goblin with white hair - goes around and blesses everyone and everything in the town. Some people believe the idea of a tengu was really based on a sunburned lost white person who showed up in the Japanese countryside. Us North Americans got a kick out of that.

The Canadian was among the “everyone and everything," his entire office needed to turn up in suits at the shrine to be blessed, so he left the house early while the rest of us took our time waking up to the mysterious and gentle sound of Japanese flute and taiko drums echoing in the distance. The drums went on all day and night, including during my awesome shower. The Canadian’s building is so close to the next building that you can leave the window open without anyone seeing you, it has the coolest bathroom stone floor, and the shower head hangs high enough that I don’t need to hunch. Throw the music on top of it, it was quite the highlight of my weekend lol

In The Town by the Other Sea (TOS), the gigantic crows, almost the size of small dogs, are terrifying and noisy, especially while you're trying to sleep. I commented on this, but CR seemed to have slept too soundly to notice. Unfortunately it was raining, so the Canadian came back soaking wet, but it didn’t stop him from making French toast with real Canadian maple syrup. Clearly “good breakfast” is the theme of my time with these people.

Rin-chan had to leave pretty much immediately after that, since it was Sunday and she needed to catch a bus back to Sapporo early for a thing with a friend, but CR, The Canadian, and myself wandered off around The TOS in search of the tengu, who was going door to door with his blessings. The Canadian was obsessed with finding him and relayed stories of how the man in the costume was *SO* into it that if someone who wasn’t supposed to be there showed up, he’d freeze in a fighting pose until his entourage of handlers would rush over and shoo you away, saying“It’s dangerous, it’s dangerous! This is a wild beast! Please stay back!” Apparently he also walks by thrusting his fists and knees into the air like some kind of muppet on 1 foot tall geta shoes. Wicked.

Well, we found the entourage but the tengu was harder to locate. It was raining on and off, but we followed in hot pursuit of the party buses playing music and holding lanterns and the children collecting tithes for the tengu. We got to see a lot of The TOS at that point, which looks very different from The City by the Sea because it’s so much more rural. When we found the tengu just as he was about to take a lunch break, so we watched a few theatrics and then the exhausted and soaked entourage disappeared into some municipal building. Ruined the image a little, but still, the idea was very cool.

We walked through an old graveyard and it began to pour like a storms on a Florida summer afternoon. Soaked to the bone in spite of our raincoats and umbrellas, we wandered through the tiny tiny matsuri (a handful of food carts), past a mural of the tengu offering sake to some fish, and up to an old temple. In the process we got invited into one of the party buses (a truck with a canopy and a second story) while it was parked outside the board of education. It wasn’t moving, thank god, stationary it was rickety enough. In the truck we got to play taiko and goof off with some kids for a while. Later we mulled about by the ocean, looking at blue and orange starfish and making dreams about the things we wanted to do in Hokkaido. CR had to say his farewells at that point, and The Canadian and I passed the afternoon until the bonfire.

The bonfire was something entirely amazing. They set a large fire of small paper curls which were continually fed in so that the flames roared 6 feet into the air. The tengu marched through them (not ran!) and people had to extinguish his costume every time he was done. After that, 10 people ran through the flames without any sort of protection, carrying a very heavy mikoshi (portable shrine). Now that was really amazing and dangerous! Definitely worth seeing.

Even in The Town by the Other Sea, they can throw a party.

8/14/09
Last night I made plans with Nao-san to go to the Mikoshi (portable shrine) parade. She invited me to her home to meet her friend Mike at 3, since it’s a holiday today and all (Obon). With my extended hours, I thought maybe I’d ask if I could leave early and it might be ok. This is kind of a stressful thing to do, what with trying to figure out the bus, get there, and get off of work (you don’t really ever ask to leave early in Japan). So this morning I decided to take the bike to work since I’d want to leave as soon as possible to get to the bus station after work. So I left the apartment ten minutes later than usual, since it wouldn’t take long to bike, but was I ever surprised when I opened the storage shed to find my bike was not there.

The Pred.

I have the key. I don’t have the bike. No one else has the key, so no one could have stolen it. It’s nowhere to be seen, which means she left it somewhere in the city. I was furious, because now I was probably going to be late. Well, I ran my ass to work and fortunately I was still a few minutes before 9 o’clock when I sat down at my desk, but that didn’t change the fact that I was hot, sweaty, and pissed. I texted The Pred immediately and curtly. I paid her for that bike, I let her and her husband use it for two weeks which meant I didn’t use it at all while they were here, and now she left it god knows where in the city? All the bikes and all the locks here look the same. How am I supposed to know it’s mine even if I see it? Will I have to try all the locks on all the bikes in the city? *sigh*

Mick-sensei was in the office again that morning and he came over to discuss things of both business and pleasure. His English is pretty much native, I’m noticing, which is astounding for a Japanese teacher of English in Japan. I’ve also noticed that his Japanese carries the Australian accent too lol He told me a little about my rent ($58! Lol) and discussed the drier issue. Unfortunately the board of education did not supply it, so they won’t fix it. He looked into new driers and drier repair and pretty much I’m looking at $500 if I want one, since most driers are all-in-one washers and there aren’t many service folks in my city by the sea. I was kind of disappointed, but he drove the point home that people don’t really use driers here, they hang their laundry. This is fine, until winter. Plus, my apartment is particularly muggy all the time, so it may always take forever to dry or worse yet, my clothes might mold. He did point out, however, that dehumidifiers would do the trick if I hung my stuff inside. I was thinking about that earlier, but I didn’t know if they used them here or not, Japanese homes not particularly being of the basement sort. He also said that if you buy it in Sapporo it’ll be cheaper and shipping is usually only $5! I’ll look around at the denki-ya’s in Sapporo when I’m at the conference on Monday, and maybe I’ll look online. I’d still end up paying something like $200 for a nice one, but at least then my house could also be drier. This moldy business is getting old.

While Mick-sensei and I were talking, I could help but bring up the bike incident. I thought twice, considering I didn’t want to look like a big old complainer and people usually consider it quite rude to complain in Japan unless you’re complaining to your absolute BFF, but I was just so upset and he responds so well to the airing of grievances against her. I mentioned what had happened and after a suitable amount of bitching, he reminded me that my bike registration had the bike number on it (fortunately we’d switched registrations before she left!) and even if I don’t find it, we can call the police and have them notify us if they do. This made me feel a lot better! Mick-sensei has been nothing but helpful and I’m very grateful to have him.

Fortunately The Pred returned my email and she thought maybe it was at school or the post office (I’m going with post office) and so we’ll see. I’m just glad she remembered because they ran a lot of errands on Sunday and it legitimately could be anywhere.

I got a little bored around lunch time and so I thought I’d go find some students. I began heading toward the gym but then felt like I’d bothered the athletes enough lately. They’re usually busy anyway. I was aiming to find shodou calligraphy students, but I stumbled across the art kids again instead. Two girls were reading manga and the same boy that’s always in there was sketching. I talked to one of the girls about the manga she was reading and it turned out to be Nana, and coincidentally, her name was also Nana! I told her I’d remember her name forever on account of that! I wandered about a little, trying to invent excuses to stay, and eventually we got to talk and joking around. When Nana revealed that her favorite actor was Johnny Depp, it lead to a lot of ridiculousness. I told them Public Enemies was filmed in my college town, but I couldn’t remember the name. As it turns out, it wasn’t released in Japan I don’t think, but I went to look it up, wrote a little blurb and drew a picture of myself giving the peace sign, and went back upstairs later to give it to them. When I came back, there were many more students in the room and they gave me a little cookie, which makes the third cookie I’ve received today, on top of other snacks people like to give me. Japan will make me fat after all! Anyway, everyone was really excited and we joked and I asked them who they loved and they asked me. The boy said Freddie Mercury and I ended up saying Johnny Depp (Jack Sparrow in particular) and Harrison Ford. If you can think of other people I should claim to love to get a big rise out of the kids, please let me know!

When eating the cookie from the art club, I realized that I’d seen this cookie on television last night. Lol fun. Upon reflecting on foods, I recalled something one of the other ALTs told me about how everyone always asks what you can and cannot eat, and what you do and do not like, but when this ALT told someone she didn’t like something that happened to be that person’s favorite food, she got really offended. Then I remembered, conversationally, I once told a woman I didn’t like boiled yams because I wanted to give her some answer instead of the same old “no no I can eat anything,” and she got all embarrassed and pathetically put her hands on her face and said, “oh, I really like those!” So in the future, I will always like boiled yams, I guess, unless I want to hurt people’s feelings. This seems kind of strange and sensitive, but then I realized that we do it in America too. Usually it’s ok if in passing someone says they don’t like something you happen to like, but if you KNOW they know you like it and they still make a big deal about not liking it, that’s very rude. The culture is the same in this instance, it’s just that in Japan there’s a lower benchmark for what’s not okay to say.

At the end of the day, not only did I not get out early, but I didn’t even get out on time. The Vice Principal wanted to have another chat session and I wasn’t sure I wanted to snub him, so I ended up missing the 5:30 bus. When I got on the next one 40 minutes later, it was a little nerve-wracking. You get on and take a stub to mark your boarding location, then at the end you put the stub in, it calculates your price, and you pay on the bus in cash. Seems a little time-consuming for a bus ride, but it must work. They have little buzzers instead of pull-chords, and fortunately I was able to read all the kanji that I didn’t miss my stop.

Nao-san lives in a cute little house closer to downtown. You can see a famous bridge from her cute little garden. We ate homemade pizza :) and not Japanese pizza either, but Italian style. It was nice eating something I could eat back home :)

When we arrived downtown, things were fairly quiet but starting to pick up. Just when I was starting to feel a little uncomfortable in the crowd, we ran into the other ALT in the City by the Sea and her husband and added them to our party. Together we watched some Yosakoi dancers, a fusion of traditional dance and Hip Hop that originated in Hokkaido. It was the coolest thing! I couldn’t even get pictures because they were going so fast. It was like a less aggressive but equally as energetic version of African dance, lots of flailing and grace. There was a little girl there who couldn’t have been more than 7 years old. She was wearing the same costume as the grown-ups and she was rocking it hardcore. They then invited the children in the audience to come out and dance with them, and I was amazing how quickly they were able to pick up the wild moves! It was a moment of jealousy for me.

And then the Mikoshi came. We only ended up seeing one, but it was all we needed. We saw people quickly clearing the streets as a swerving shrine charged down the street on the shoulders of maybe 20 or so men. Even better, they were all quite drunk and wearing nothing but gauze and silly costumes. One gentleman had a pair of underwear over his pants with a bicycle handlebars attached. There were young women riding around hanging on to the floats as they swerved almost uncontrollably back and forth across the narrow street. One man in front vigorously yelled directions into a microphone and the men carrying the float chanted back, “wasshoi!” Bystanders brought over bowls of water to throw onto them, whether it was to cool them off or to make things more interesting, I’ll never know, but it seemed like a common practice. A sake cart trailed behind them with all sorts of alcohol, and when the put the shrine down to take a break they tried to shake the women off first. I’d almost been hit in the face with a pole from the shrine because I was standing too close and it comes at you so quickly!

When they stopped, we were so tickled by the raucous younger dudes that we asked to take a picture with them which lead to more shenanigans, like them spitting beer into the faces of unsuspecting friends. Nao-san said she used to work with some of the older men at the newspaper, so it seemed just to be a cool thing for men to do in their spare time. You gotta hand it to Japan, they know how to work but they also know how to have fun.

They asked us about ourselves and insisted we drink with them, which was funny because we were just thrust beer cans and cups of sake from complete strangers, all in the spirit of celebration. (Drinking on the street is not illegal in Japan, so every time an ALT goes out drinking in the street, at least one cheeky picture of them drinking in front of a cop gets taken, but of course it’s silly because it’s legal. In fact, doing that last night we got some puzzled looks from women passing by lol). One of them men said I should get on the Mikoshi, but I respectfully declined lol Still, it was one of the most exciting things I’ve seen since coming to Japan.

After that we went up to the shrine, which was at the end of a million steps lined with lanterns. I thought it'd be great to come back in autumn when the leaves had changed :) Right before the main entrance there was a well of water where we washed our hands and rinsed out our mouths to approach the shrine (though apparently people don’t do the mouth thing so much anymore, what with sanitation concerns and everything).

There were little girls giving a dance recital of traditional dances in front of a small folding-chair audience. The band was live, which was cool, but the dance wasn’t very exciting. We stuck around for a while and got to see a man jump around on that same stage waving fans, and we saw several costume changes for the little girls. They were very cute, but less than dynamic lol Apparently they were going to throw mocha out into the crowd later, but we didn’t want to stick around any more, no matter how much we all liked mocha. On our way out we prayed at the shrine, and the man in charge gave us each a small pink sugar cookie. Or at least, he said it was a sugar cookie, and what he really meant was, it was a patty of pure sugar lol


Though fun as the evening was, when I swung by the post office on my way home, I realized there was no bike there :(