thinking about speaking

Yesterday I taught more classes back to back than I ever have before. Gunch had said to me that teaching is a physical labour but I just thought he was being dramatic - turns out tarum tarum, he's right. I had to eat cake between class four and five, just to ensure I didn't pass out.

In my local language class that caters to JETS-like-me, other random English teachers and several Filipino ship engineers and their families, our conversation practice last night with Fukuda sensei turned horticultural. He asked me what I had done on the weekend and I told him that I had planted lavender but they were sick. How, he asked. I was already quite proud that I had managed to say 'lavender sick', - an actual diagnosis in Japanese would just be too much. So I made limp lavender actions with my arms and head, lolling and looking baleful as if in a wet wind. Ah! says Fukuda sensei, you are watering them too much. Guilty as charged, I have been watering them everyday and I told him so. Yes, that is the problem he mused, he then drew a diagram of lavender, the sun, a watering can and various clocks and arrows. And words of course. I learnt the words for sun, grow and plant medicine (which I think might be a 'made up for my benefit' word, not one that would yield any results if I went around saying it at the local nursery). After the plant talk we went on to adjectives and their conjugation and while my friends and language partners The Lithe American and The Happy Brit battled with negative form I withdrew into my head for a quick reflection. I was in Japan. I am in Japan. Me and The Lithe American and The Happy Brit and the funny little community we are part of, are learning - no dammit - speaking Japanese. I struggle to call what I do to the language speaking but if its getting the point across (with some necessary lavender impersonations), then that is speaking. Speaking Japanese? How utterly weird. And a bit great. All these thoughts must have shown on my face because The Lithe American turned and asked 'Having a existential, Jemy?' Haha, yes I said. She said it happens to her all the time too.

Later that night I found myself in a car with two Japanese people and My Best Mexican American. Conversation was lively and multi-lingual. One of the Japanese people there was fluent in English and Spanish, the other in Japanese and Laughing. Had I had my existential then, I think my head would have popped. Four people, three languages? Conversational success to the point of revelry? Amazing. Just amazing. But luckily I had had a few beers, so I couldn't reflect, just participate with a little bit of Japanese, a lot of English and lots of lolling lavender style actions.

kimono

Today I had a traditional day with kimono wearing and tea ceremony. Both were stupendously beautiful and also rather painful. I'm not going to go into detail - safe to say I simply couldn't do either event justice without expending thousands of words trying to capture every intricacy and minutiae. Both felt very formal and I mean formal as in 'concerned with form'. It was fascinating. Overwhelming. Beautiful, so so beautiful. Those kimonos? God, to die for. Look at some pics here.
On me though...eh, let's just say they do not um, celebrate bodies like mine. I had to take off my bra (the first time I have been braless in public since, like, I was 15) and a woman (who, no kidding, came up to my waste) strapped them down with meters of cloth till I was not so much flat chested, that could never happen, but barrel chested. I didn't have breasts, I had chest. Like an opera singer man or a chuffed bird. It was sore (and not very flattering) but totally worth it because I wore something so beautiful and I had the experience of being dressed by two women - it feels totally regal. They way their warm, rough hands snaked and tweaked about was wondrous to witness. Wearing a kimono is not a single garment affair you see, I was wearing at least twenty items of clothing - seriously! And their hands belied an intimate knowledge of the ancient technology of the clothes. The dressing is a necessary accompanying master-craft to the making of kimono themselves, if they are ever to be more than elaborate wall hangings. Being inside that kimono and inside that activity felt very luxuriant and comforting. Sitting in Seiza (the traditional sitting position expected of you at tea ceremony - see here) is the opposite - it is mean and desperately uncomfortable. I thought I would pass out at one point during the ceremony which is only half an hour : 27 minutes too much Seiza. Man, it sucks! Apparently you get better with practice. I'm sure eating forks also improves, with practice.