Me in Mihara

Something is hatching

2009-07-07T08:04:00.001+09:00

Every day Gunch does wonderful things for me and we have wonderful conversations. I have become wholly spoilt and come to expect it. Today he surpassed all expectation. When I arrived through the office door, I still had my teacher face on, having just taught a class. I don't know exactly what my teacher face looks like although I do know what it feels like; it feels stern but motherly, like a nurse in a WWI tent who has seen a thing or two, takes no nonsense from boisterous invalids and will kindly mop the brow of the legless until they breath their last. That's what I want to be, when I am a teacher. How ridiculous.

Anyways, I arrived through the door with my teacher face on and Gunch was sprawled at my desk, looking triumphant, a newspaper open in front of him. This was unusual because generally we respect each other's desks as private space. By meeting at the empty desk in the middle of the office, we allow each other privacy. His mouldy coffee tins and dictionary towers are his business. My celeb blogs and heaps of chocolate wrappers are my business. 'Jemma-san', he said, 'today I have some very very good news.'
'Really?' said I, I know he likes to play these things out at a leisurely pace, 'what's that?'

It turned out to be very, very good news indeed; a bulb of news that, as from-bulb gardeners know, may flower beautifully or sadly come to nought. If it does flower...well let me just tell you!
Gunch had me sit down and he showed me a small article in the local section of the paper. In the picture accompanying the article was a man doing a Kamishibai performance. Kamishibai is my new obsession, the traditional form of storytelling said to have spawned manga. It effectively died with the advent of TV but it can be seen in places like the manga museum (where I saw it) or at little local festivals and events. Before the war it was huge. Every town had several Kamishibai performers: men trying to supplement their income by riding around on bicycles with ingenious, very portable little stages strapped to the back. They would be welcomed at the gates to the local temples by swarms of kids and would tell stories using painted picture cards that slotted into the little stage. The monies were earned by selling sweets. Everyone could watch a Kamishibai performance but buyers got to sit in the coveted front row.

The article Gunch showed me had a picture too. The picture was not a black and white one of a 40s Kamishibai performance, but a colour pic of a performance that happened two days ago at the local medical school, which is spitting distance from my house. The crux of the article, which we read together (so very slowly, in case we needed to build any more tension) was that medical students stand to gain valuable people skills from performance like Kamishibai. It teaches them to chill out and listen and the importance of humour. Nothing new there. Then the article talks a little bit about the performer himself Higeroku-san (a nickname that roughly means Beardy). He is 67 - 'a spring chicken' says Gunch, now 68. Higeroku-san used to work in a collar and cuffs at a desk right here in Mihara. Then he retired and began performing Kamishibai. He travels all around Hiroshima prefecture but he lives in Mihara and produces his work from here.

We finished reading the article. I now knew where this was going and Gunch obliged by leaning back his eyes twinkling. 'Yes, he said, we will make contact with this man and you can speak with him.'

For months I have had thoughts rattling around in my kop - mostly they polarize into two camps - the 'what am i doing with my future' camp and the 'why am i feeling so fucked up in Japan?' camp. Kamishibai, at first abstractly but now I think, pretty concretely, will help me to calm and order my thoughts. As an art form, it neatly and perfectly includes everything I like to do. Making the pictures and telling the story. As a viable theater form its kind of great too. The style of storytelling relies heavily on sounds and gestures and the pictures of course, so it can transcend languages and age gaps quite nicely. Different pictures, or different deliveries can change your performance from playschool fare to serious political analysis or bawdy nonsense. As a proposal to a university it also seems like a pretty good weapon to have. "I want to make cheap, effective, sometimes political, sometimes educational, always relevant, mass appeal theatre and I want to do everything myself and this is how I can do it." l

Then, really the 'why am I feeling so fucked in Japan?' question has had an answer for months but it's very had for me to acknowledge. I am feeling fucked because I am not integrating, I have spent the better part of the year simply adjusting to the horror or foreign cultural terrain and any time left over I have divided equally between avoiding the now less alien but no less terrifying cultural terrain and berating myself for avoiding it. Apart from Gunch, I have no Japanese friends here. Not in any real sense. That is immensely depressing, given the length of time I have been here, and I blame no one but myself.

Imagine though! Imagine if Gunchy and I meet this man (whose real name is Rokuda Genji) and he is cool and he offers to show me Kamishibai, or even just chat with me? It could be the beginning of my next creative endeavour, an endeavour that is inectricable from th place where I am - Japan. Something I can take away and show to people - "In Japan I learned this." . My friendhsip with Gunch will I am sure, always be the most valuable thing I have gained here, but Kamishibai is something else, something quantifiable to people who wear glasses and want to see product and issue scholarships. For that I am very excited. I am excited to have found an art form that makes me excited. For a time, friends, it did feel like those pockets of my brain had plasticized. Did I blog about it? Probably not. It was too fucking terrifying.

Gunch went to find Rokuda Genji in the phone book. Sure enough, he found him. We crafted a letter to him, I wrote in English in green ink and Gunch wrote in his signature dusty pencil on bent and mucky paper. I don't know how he manages to destroy paper, old Gunch, just by holding the stuff. I will give him a pristine pile of worksheets, he hands them to students right then and there and somehow by the time they are in their hands not his, they are water-damaged, torn, bent and covered in mud. It's amazing. Gunch had no doubts that Rokuda Genji will be responsive; he reckons that if this man grew up in Mihara then they probably sat and watched original Kamishibai performers of the town together. He assures me that Rokuda Genji will know the famous Kamishibai story of The Golden Bat - a super hero with a skull for a head. He ended the day's excitement with a (mis)quote from Charlotte's Web - 'life is full and rich when we are waiting for something to happen or to hatch.' He knows that the quote isn't quite right and heas been browsing through Charlotte's Web for weeks trying to get it right. He hasn't found it. He has turned his copy into a frayed soggy mess. But I know exactly what he is trying to say.

skuru festivaru

2009-06-21T01:49:00.003+09:00

Hi. Apologies for the absence. Today was school festival - a Potted Sports type affair with copious amounts of fried chicken, lurid slushies as bright as the class t-shirts and other healthy eating options. It was great fun! I ate junk and looked at weird things made by the students. I made my own stamps out of erasers, gambled with cardboard chips and even attempted to solve mathsy brain teasers in the quiz game classroom (aided by two very patient students who had the option of thinking I was dim-witted because of the language barrier or because my maths is so very very kak, regardless of the language in which the problems are presented).

It's starting to feel like I am part of the school - not some strange interloper, easily identified by my hair colour, eye colour and aimless wandering about. I still have these traits, but they they are now a known quantity, not so strange anymore. I think that when I felt isolated and unwanted (which was most of the time I have spent here thus far, if I am honest) it was partly because in my head I was expecting certain people to like me for certain reasons. It turns that actually other people like me because of different reasons. You simply can't always choose who likes you and why they should. Another life lesson then. I prefer it when life lessons are accompanied by junk food. Junk food softens both the gut and the blow to one's ego when things, as they invariably have been doing, don't go according to plan.

Yesterday and Today (昨日と今日は)

2009-05-28T18:58:00.001+09:00

Yesterday I read all about North Korea on Wikipedia. Today I am reading all about Roe. v Wade. There is so much to know in the world! I wonder what I will read about tomorrow.

The Day Before Yesterday (Ototoi おととい)

2009-05-28T18:56:00.001+09:00

I bought a new bicycle. She is an extravagance inasmuch as my old bicycle is perfectly functional. She was a bargain in that she was cheap. Especially bargain-some in that she is extremely gorgeous, much more than my old bike. Pinky (that's her name) also has a useful back ledge, the likes of which I have wanted for some time - good for carrying people or perhaps setting up a tv/dvd system so that, if I ride very slowly people walking behind me can watch movies.

Pinky New Rules (that's her full name) has changed my opinion of myself completely. I have dressed with much more care in the two days that I have had her. Because she is so pink and so beautiful, she stands out anywhere - if I am on her therefore I must surely be extra presentable since heads will be a-turnin.

I made a fool of myself twice in the hour it took to buy Pinky New Rules. Firstly, I tried to ask the man at the UFO home-store when he would attach the chain. A bike needs a chain after all. Luckily my Japanese is so rubbish that it was taking him a good long time to work out what I was talking about. In that time I worked out for myself that the chain is inside a convenient compartment. Amazing what they do on first-world bikes! I kept the revelation to myself and distracted the man with some banal comment so that he would never discover the depths of my Luddism.

Secondly, I was under the impression that I had to go and get Pinky registered at the police station in case she was ever stolen. Dutifully I headed off and spent a happy twenty minutes being amiable with three police officers that looked like huge action figures covered in more detachable accessories than any young boy could ever dream of. The most senior of the three saw to my case. He looked at my registration papers (issued by UFO-man) and my alien registration card - how extraterrestrial this all sounds, looking back. We hit a snag only when he began asking me when I bought the bike where the bike was and where my old bike was. I became guarded because dumping old bikes is, i suspect, a serious felony here and technically that was what I had done - I left it at the Lawson convenience store next to the UFO center. Oh, said I, the old bike is...somewhere. Yes, he persisted. Where is it? shit! I was going down - I broke into a sweat. Senior Action Policeman then called for back-up and brought in Junior Action Policeman, distracting him from his noble task of tippexing out a bathroom mirror in an architectural drawing of a men's bathroom (he was doing it with super-hero level precision). They discussed me and my case, seemingly to decide who would be good cop, who would be bad cop. Like hardened interrogators they kept asking, in slightly different ways - 'where is the bike?' . I could feel my story wilting. Finally I said 'the new bike is here! the old bike is at Lawson! please, please don't throw me in the slammer!' They looked extremely surprised and asked to see the new bike. ONly with pleasure sirs, she is after all, such a beauty! We went outside together and marveled over Pinky. Then we went back inside and Senior Action asked me for the number of my school and the name of my supervisor. I told him everything.

After speaking with my supervisor (laughing even when crime in Japan was, or so I thought, no laughing matter), he handed the phone to me. I was sure my supervisor would then gently explain the protocol for foreigners in Japanese prisons. 'You bought a new bike?' he asked
'Yes,' I sniffled, 'at the UFO home center.'
'Where is your old bike?' he asked.
'At the Lawson.' I said, trying to keep it all under control.
'So everything is OK?'
'Umm..yes. Everything is ok! I promise I won't abandon my old bike!'
'Why are you at the police-station?'
'Um...to register my bike?'
'It is already registered!' he laughed. hahaha! go home!
Relief washed over me. I was not going to be put away for attempted bike abandonment. I handed the phone back to Senior Action and backed quietly out of the police-box, their barked questions and secret laughter ringing in my ears. They had thought I was reporting a stolen bike and couldn't work out why seeing as I obviously knew the location of not one, but two bikes. And I had thought I was going down! Hahaha, Lost in Translation - what fun! Oh Pinky! The adventures we have had already!

thinking about speaking

2009-04-29T08:22:00.004+09:00

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

2009-04-26T21:54:00.000+09:00

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.

Let the Wild Rumpus Start!

2009-04-25T20:17:00.000+09:00

Today I went to a big book shop in Hiroshima that has a good English language book section. However, and I think I can afford to be smug here - I was not going for English books today. Oh no. I was buying Japanese books! For Japanese people and, and for myself!

I bought a copy of Winnie the Pooh in the hometaal for Gunch's daughter and then I bought myself my very own Japanese book. A manga called Hinachan. I chose it because the pictures are cute but mainly because the writing is really big and there isn't much kanji. Even so, I fear I might still be in over my head - I'll get Gunch to help me out! Being in the kiddies section of the shop inspired me to really hammer at this Japanese - do you know I can read all the Maurice Sendaks, Eric Carle's Very Hungry Caterpillar, Eloise, The Shrinking of Treehorn, The Little Prince? All in Japanese. This bookshop had the platonic ideal of a children's section with the one ironic oddity that it was all written top to bottom in a language I can't read.

I can't read now... Maybe soon, or not so soon, I will. I want to read Fantastic Mister Fox with Boggis-san and Bunce-san and Bean-san, one tall, one fat one lean-san! Wouldn't that be amazing? Suddenly another year here doesn't seem like nearly enough. I could spend the entire year just in the kiddies section of Fukuya bookshop rereading all the classics.

confession, maybe to Peter Carey

2009-04-24T23:46:00.000+09:00

I have a confession to make. I like cheap, nasty sushi. I'm not sure who it is that I feel am now ready to confess this to - my old self, the sushi snob, is probably as good as anyone. My two favourite kinds of sushi are: a nigiri where the fish has been covered with a thin latticework of mayonnaise that has then been blow torched and 'purorn furai' - a giant maki with a fat tempura prawn inside.

Sushi snobs would certainly balk at these as they slid past on the belt. I used to be a sushi snob. I assumed no restaurant in South Africa really knew anything about the hallowed art of sushi but I'd still eat it as often as possible. I would begin a sushi meal out (beacause when you eat sushi, by god you will allow naught but sushi to pass your lips) with the pompous question 'How is the tuna today?' The waiter most times would say 'Ja, there isn't any today. Sorry.' and I, the sushi aficionado would then crumple dejectedly over my sparkling mineral water and resign myself to an evening of infuriating limitations. No tuna? Man it sucks living in the third world... While I waited for my order, the amazing sushi I wasn't having would float though my mind on an imaginary round-a-belt. A sushi meal in Japan, I imagined, would be entirely different. There would be at least 3000 varieties of fish on offer, each more beautiful and bizarre than anything available in Greenpoint, Cape Town let alone Greenside, Jozi. I was being cheated out of an unimaginable culinary experience - that not many could handle but that I would not only handle, but relish dammit - all because down at the bottom of the continent, no chef had the balls to ante up and no patron had the stomach to see them. And so as I wolfed down the salmon rolls and salmon maki and salmon sashimi, though I cooed and puffed appreciatively, my mind would still drift not just to the tuna I wished I was eating but the two thousand nine hundred and ninety eight other complicated fishes I was sure I would love, as soon as I had met them.

In Peter Carey's book (that I have mentioned before) Wrong About Japan, his son, a manga and anime freak, comes with his dad to Japan on the proviso that they never indulge the romantic notion of 'Real' Japan. Carey, a total Nipponophile argues against but eventually agrees to his sons terms: they are not to indulge in a single temple, geisha, museum, festival, garden, historic site, painting, kimono or traditional meal. It's extreme sure, but the kid while only 12 at the time must have known what his dad would have done, unchecked. I think the that sushi I dreamt of - all silver tentacles and glistening slime - qualifies as the 'Real' Japan that Carey dreamt of too.

Real Japan... the other two thousand and ninety eight. I have met some of them, and I meet new ones all the time. I'm sorry former me. I'm sorry Peter Carey. I'm sorry sushi snobs all over the world: I don't like them, I kind of hate them. I thought I could handle them but I can't. Alas, my snob-self would die of shame. But, but, but she didn't know! She didn't know about the small fish networked with veins, eaten whole. Her imagination did not extend to the taste and mouthfeel of cuttle fish, that turns into runny dentists clay in your mouth and all the way down your throat. Uncooked crab still half in it's spiny legs. Enormous, inky prawns that look much more like the wriggling robo-virus from The Matrix that squirms its way into Keanu via his belly-button than something you would want to eat.

If I once began in Carey's camp, avidly seeking the Real Deal, then now, after nearly a year in Japan I must say, at least where sushi is concerned, I have crossed over to side with his infinitely wiser 12 year son. And I am so much happier for it. So there aint nothing Real about 'hanbaagaa sushi' - a ball of rice with half a frikkadel and gravy on top. Doesn't mean it doesn't taste (and look) kind of awesome. I think the boy might have liked the resturaunt where it was served up too, it was about as authentic as the sea aroma that comes out of an air freshening egg. Huge and as brightly lit as any McDonalds, the sushi came past each booth on a massive snaking belt. The second best thing was that every plate that came past cost only 100 yen. The third best thing was that there was hanbaagaa sushi and purorn fry and only recognisable fish (the fish I wrote off as dull before I got to Japan) and most of it was covered in mayo. The best thing was the 'express' belt that lay above the regular belt - if you ordered something (from the LCD screen inserted into your booth) it would be whizzed to you in seconds by a train shaped tray on the top belt - bullet sushi. as exciting and exacting as the trains it imitates. The sushi tray stopped dead at our booth, without even rattling a prawn tail.

So that's my confession. What exactly? That I like hamburger sushi. Is that so wrong? Its not like I put preserved ginger on it or anything (I remember hearing a real fucking wanker of a sushi snob once belittle someone for doing that: 'Umm...that's like putting ice cream on your steak' he said witheringly). Loving the Surreal more than the Real. Is that so wrong? The Real is so rich, so textured, so very very foreign. And loving it is just too hard. It takes too long. I would have to eat cuttle fish for months before I learned not to gag and years maybe before I learnt to really love it. I ask you: who has the time for that? Or indeed the inclination when instead there is a deepfry fastfood/sushi. The best-of -both-worlds, a nasty cross breed hammering its way right towards my face on a little miniature train.

gym people

2009-04-16T19:33:00.001+09:00

I have started going to gym. Its very odd. But nice. It started when I was deeply miserable and I hated being here so desperately I wanted to rip people's heads off - but you can't. The gym was the next best option on terms of stress relief. I am no longer hating it here by the way. Must have just been the winter.
I'm getting all kinds of new muscles (thanks to my genes, I sprout fat leg muscles by just looking at the rowing machine). I try to stretch them out - make them long and balletic by stretching for at least half an hour. This is also a great time to stare at the other people in the gym. I don't feel bad about staring because they ogle me shamelessly. So I sweat more than anyone they have ever seen. Must they really make me feel so so very alien? I don't know if I will ever get used to these stares.

So when I am staring - getting my own back, there a some specific people I like to stare at the most. The first one is the fittest octogenarian alive. A leetle old lady with a bad pot haircut that can bench her body weight and run on the stair master for what would probably equal forty temples' worth of stairs. She's supple too, folding flat onto the floor between her legs if she wants to whilst staring at my boobs and tummy that prevent me from getting anywhere near that far. Next I like to stare at a man who is square in shape. I think he is a boxer or he likes to pretend to be a boxer. He wears leg warmers and doo-rags and likes to punch the little scrotum shaped punching ball a lot. He doesn't do any cardio, if he did he might loose his perfect rhomboid proportions. There is a very good looking young guy who likes to work on his carves and stretch. I like to stare at him. He is slightly mysterious and very ridiculous because he wears sunglasses and a beanie for the entire duration of his work out. A mother and daughter duo are often at the gym while I am there. The mum wears normal outside clothes - flannel shirts and cords and is there only to look after her daughter who has some kind of muscular dystrophy or something. She's a trooper though, the girl. She does bike, treadmill and stair master for ages in her peculiar jerky way. the mum just sits idly drinking tea. I'm sure she would help her daughter out if she needed it but she clearly doesn't. One of my students has started coming to the gym. No, he has probably been coming for ages but recently our times have overlapped. I guess he's been coming for ages because he is almost as fit as the octogenarian. He likes to walk around on his hands and he does his exercises according to an elaborate set of notes he carries around in a slim red file.

As you can probably tell from the patrons, this aint no Virgin Super Active Delux. I hope, with summer approaching, that is has air conditioning.

cherry blossom picnic and a bit of badminton

2009-04-16T19:27:00.000+09:00

picture c/o Nick Bradley.

2009-04-13T21:00:00.000+09:00

(an extract from an email to Mia)

I had a beautiful picnic on top of a mountain this weekend with a big lolloping bunch of expats. We noised and messed and yet the Japanese still love us. We are untrained puppies. The picnic was in honour of the cherry blossoms which are waning now. Saturday was an exceptional day to watch the change - in the morning the entire park was bright and shining with fat petals but as the day progressed the breeze sent them dancing from the branches into our hair and our open beers. By the time we left, late in the evening, the trees were more leaf than flower. Spring turned into summer right before my eyes. It was beautiful. And also cunningly sad somehow. The death that was wrapped up in the life of it.

On Sunday I prepared my balcony for my parents imminent arrival. It was a real dump site with black muck on everything, old cigarette butts and dead plants. Now it has super retro green astro turf on the floor and everything is clean (I even swept the walls!) I'm gonna plant basil and other things once I have properly aired and fertilized the soil in the window boxes (guess who's been reading about gardeing on the internet?). Im also coveting a wooden bench that has been lying outside my apartment building for the last few weeks. It'll go just poifectly with the fake grass. Gunch helped me word a little note that I have now attached to the bench. It says 'This bench is too good to waste! I want it. If it has not moved by Sunday I am going to take it with much thanks." . I attached the last of my South African beaded brooches to the note...just to let them know I am from a poor place but my heart is pure. Gunch says leaving little love notes on abandoned bicycles and furniture and things is not all that unusual and can sometimes lead to new friends. Oh Japan you sweet thing!

2009-03-26T20:47:00.000+09:00

Father Brian Finn, Edward Norton's sweet priest in Keeping the Faith says of a little Bonnard in the Met - "Sometimes we don't see certain things until we're ready to see them in a certain way." I have been riding past a shoe shop a few blocks from Mihara train station for months now but on Saturday morning, suddenly and for no apparent reason, I really saw the shop and I went inside. It's the kind of shop which would blend in on Diagonal Street or the in Oriental Plaza. The sign that ran across the shop-front lintel was dated and cracked. Shoe carousels made from dry-cleaning hanger type wire carrying non-descript men's brogues cluttered the entrance. Inside I had to walk sideways through the cluttered aisles and mismatched display cases. The walls were lined floor to ceiling with boxes. The place might actually have been made of boxes so that if the it had a closing down sale, customers would literally dismantle it with every purchase.

I didn't know exactly what I was looking for but I walked out with two pairs of it. The stock in was so old and neglected that the shop keeper had to follow me around with a damp cloth, wiping the cakey dust and cobwebs off any model I took an interest in (it would probably only take a day or two for him to clean the entire shop but for some reason, this seemed never to have been done). The first shoes to catch my eye that day were a pair of suede boating loafers. The shop keeper, a middle aged, unremarkable looking man who had until my arrival in front of the boating shoes been smoking and playing solitaire on a yellowing PC, scuttled over and wiped them down. Once they had been cleaned it was revealed that the toe walls were crimson and the upper was navy, the tongue and tassles were brilliant white. They were beautiful retro perfection but not retro because they were not made now with a cursory glance back in time. They were made whenever multi-tone suede boating shoes were decorous. They were the real deal. Tragedy - They didn't fit.

With our first interaction - my reaching for a shoe and his bustling up to clean it and then apologise for it's ill-fit - browsing had changed from something I did to something we did together, the shopkeeper and me versus the shop. He quickly proved himself an invaluable asset - he literally knew our opponent inside out and once he had ascertained what it was I wanted (done through instinct that bordered on the telepathic) things happened very quickly. After the boating accident, I went off to have a quiet cry in the men's Oxfords section. Shopkeeper disappeared but not, as I had initially suspected, back to his solitaire. - While I consoled myself he was rifling and arrived in among the Oxfords and presented me with a pair of shoes and a face which said "Like these?". I could see why he might have thought I would like them, they were like the boating loafers in shape. But they were not in essence the same - they were grey quilted monstrosity booties, a style that is very popular
with little Japanese grannies. Shaking my head politely I said "No" and then "Chotto..." which is an often employed Japanese euphemism,
"Chotto..." - "a little bit..." one need never finish the sentence; if you are lucky a listener will get the point . Ah! A light went on in his head - I liked the boating shoes for their je ne sais quoi, not their gestalt, of course! He rushed off and refined his search whilst I employed the I Feel Lucky approach - which in the shop, like on the internet, was frankly baffling. Rounding a corner a few minutes later I found Shopkeeper extracting three apparently identical shoes from a dusty pile. After cleaning the shoes were revealed as a ruby, dutch blue and tangerine orange examples of a patent leather pump. They were beautiful. A person who wore the boating loafer would so obviously wear these magnificent shoes! All real patent leather, all beautiful. Shopkeeper had struck gold. I tried them all on and spent long minutes examining my
self from the ankle down in a mirror deciding which colour went best with my bottom 30cm. I wanted them all but they were real leather and the faded price tag read 9000 Yen apiece. Shopkeeper sensed my simultaneous lust and trepidation. "Two thousand each" he said. Too Brilliant. I chose the tangerine pair (I will no doubt go back next month for the blue and crimson).

Riding the wave of this retail success I wandered into the athletic section - could lightning strike twice? I picked up an ancient pair of white asics with gold detailing and looked at the contemplatively. I did not intend to try them on (they were clearly far too big). What I was doing was wordlessly transmitting my intention to buy canvas shoes and what kind I liked to Shopkeeper. Yet again he disappeared. Two minutes later he returned with a pair of plain as jane white canvas takkies. Only their shape and slight yellowing belie their age - they will go with anything whilst adding an air of other-timeousness to an outfit. They fit like a glove and cost me 800 Yen. haha!

I'm never going to buy shoes anywhere else in Japan I think. Why bother? Right here in Mihara I have an undiscovered archive of shoes, old but spanking brand new. There is also a man there who can sniff through the dust to unite me with exactly the shoe I want, like a Saint Bernard finding a nearly expired climber in endless drifts of snow.

Spring's slow approach

2009-03-12T19:35:00.001+09:00

I don't know what to write about lately so I haven't written about anything. Many of the things I have previously written about are still happening and although they are still exciting and enjoyable, they offer up no new anecdotes. I am starting to get tired of trying to be incisive in these blogs as, I am sure, you all are tired of hearing me harp on and on about how wonderful this or that is, or what deep revelation I had a the top of some bloody hill. Quite honestly many days are a simple repetition of days I have already had. Things that were new are now repetitive things. Routine. And no one wants to read about routine unless the writer can write like Raymond Carver or Brett Easton Ellis.

Of course everywhere on earth there are people plodding through days doing things they have done already, over and over again. You might say it's not worth mentioning something so inevitable but I think there is a particular pique when one wakes up in the middle of what was anticipated as an adventure and realises they are folding linen, washing dishes, eating soup and riding the same stretch of road day in and day out. Strangely it is in the moments when I catch myself doing something so completely devoid of interest, that I imagine myself in a movie. It's the kind of movie where you meet the characters at their most monotonous, you learn about the minutiae of their lives and then it all gets turned upside down by love or war breaking out or a monster coming out of the sea and tearing through the city for no apparent reason. Imagining that the minutiae of my life might be interesting to the (albeit arty and tiny) audience of a movie makes them once again interesting to me.

I have become intensely aware of the changing season - all my senses are checking and double checking any possible turns or alterations. I want Spring so badly and man, you know what they say about a watched pot! God! It's infuriating!

Today Gunch taught me 'to be or not to be、that is the question' in the hometaal -
that's a nice thing to know isn't it?
生きる　か　死め　か　それ　が　問題だ。

ferries

2009-02-22T09:23:00.000+09:00

I thought a ferry was a small boat, open on all sides, fat bottomed, sometimes with a viewing deck. Some ferries are like this. Other ferries, like the Shin-Nihonkai ferry I took from Tsuruga in Kansai to Tomakomai in Hokkaido are massive ships! Real ships carrying cars and trucks and cargo and other enormous metal things besides. The passengers, like myself, are the least of the ships' concern. The big money must surely be in the enormous metal things it ferries and passengers are an afterthought, some icing on top. This is why travelling by ferry can be so cheap, I think. The trip we took by ferry cost a fraction of an airline ticket and even a train ticket. I am now Shin-Nihonkai's no.1 fan and not just because I'm a cheap skate but because I'm a cheapskate who likes to feel posh.

On Shin-Nihonkai one can feel incredibly posh. Fancy a stroll on the promenade madam? Only with pleasure. The promenade is a carpeted corridor on the ship's port side. It has wicker chairs and tables where you can sit staring out of door sized windows onto the sea. Having never been at sea before I thought sea was blue and quite flat (except for around the edges). Some sea is like this perhaps. Other sea, the sea we sailed, is turbulent and grey. Everything is grey, the sky, the spray and the deep water itself - it was the most beautiful, terrifying grey of all. Thick and dark like graphite, glowing with a matt brilliance on its choppy peaks. I could have looked at it for hours. Staring into the endless deep can make one quite chilly and in that case madam, please retire to the bathhouse. Here, like in traditional Japanese onsen you shower yourself off before getting into a huge communal tub of pleasantly sweltering water. I had that deep, almost painful realisation of a truly unique experience as lay I lay there in a huge tub of hot water staring out of a port window onto the ocean and Japanese snowy peaks beyond.

After a soak, what better than a massage? The ferry's two coin operated massage chairs were my first experience of such things. They are ridiculous! They have metal knobs and twiddlers hidden in their lazy boy upholstery. They start gently and can build to Swedish Masochist levels of abuse. Not only do you feel quietly ashamed of enjoying the touch of a robot, there is, or at least there was for me, the public humiliation of the wobbling and jiggling. In Japan men and women alike are not ashamed of public preening in the windows of trains. Similarly, the shame of public wobbling and jiggling at the hands of a maniacal robot does not phase them (eating whilst walking and drinking standing up on the other hand, are things to be embarrassed about). I enjoyed the chair but not entirely. I couldn't stop imagining what I looked like - the picture was alternately dishonorable and very funny.

Ah, so the massage perhaps not to Madam's tastes. Please take yet another dip in the bath to rid yourself of the experience and then partake perhaps, in a meal from the galley restaurant (paying special attention to the nifty rubber bottomed crockery - so that your soup and coffee don't slide away from you).

Yes, I enjoyed my ferry trips so very much! Thinking back I have almost forgotten the two port towns they left from, Tsuruga and Tomakomai, grubby and sad they seemed to me. The experience was like smoked salmon and cream cheese sandwiched between to stale pieces of wonderbread. In such instances, why lament the bread if in your mind, you can simply eat the filling with your fingers?

my adventures in Wonderland

2009-02-14T21:15:00.000+09:00

I have just returned from my trip up North - Hokkaido, Nagano and a whole lot inbetween. It was an utterly wonderful week, the highlight of which was Snow Monkeys. Even though I saw them only yesterday, the whole experience has become unreal to me. I simply cannot believe that I saw those creatures, that I could just sit there and be with them! So for now, please look at some piccies and I will write in detail during the week.

new pics

2009-02-01T09:45:00.000+09:00

Hello friends. There are some pictures of winter clothes and other bits of my life here, on my flickr account.

Winter Fashion in Mihara

2009-01-30T17:55:00.000+09:00

It's all the rage. If you have a cold, you wear a mask. Yet another example of people kindly thinking of others. And you don't look such a twat, because every third person is wearing one too. I even like this one a little - it's got some ninja styling don't you think?

Nemawashi

2009-01-30T17:33:00.000+09:00

Ah Nemawashi! I felt like, after being here for six months I was finally making some real progress when Gunch and Watanabe explained it explicitly to me. Jane Goodall must have felt a bit like this when one of the chimps finally condescended to touch her or feed her or whatever it was. A breakthrough! I was privileged enough to learn it at the feet of not one but two 67 year olds. They told me everything. Nemawashi. I have sensed it and felt its influence. More disruptive has been the influence I have had on those around me because I don't know what it is.
Nemawashi! Let me explain...

The first part of the word Nemawashi (the Ne) is the kanji for root (like the roots of a tree). Gunch explained that when you plant (or dig up to replant) a tree you must work the soil carefully - loosening, digging, turning and patting - in an area wider than you think in order to ensure harmonious planting or upheaval. Nemawashi is groundwork and preparation. Its metaphorical meaning is a beeg part of Japan culture, Watanabe went on to explain (Watanabe, by the way, is the motorcycle chommie who now comes and hangs out at school quite regularly. I thought he was a Yamamoto. Apologies Watanabe!). You see, he began, The Japanese don't like conflict. They don't like to argue or debate. They don't like to antagonize or make anyone feel uncomfortable. Smooth social interaction is the most important thing! So? So before any delicate conversation that must be had - Nemawashi is performed. Days or weeks of gentle groundwork to ascertain every one's opinion and investment in a matter, the various whys and wherefores and then what the best possible outcome will be. With all this Nemawashi-ing, groundwork being so carefully laid, any meeting acting becomes simply symbolic because the decisions as it were have been arrived at weeks before - in a slow and private way.

And this is good thing to learn you may think, for the business world or when I have to say very big things to very important people. This will not be often though. So, a good thing to learn but not of day to day importance perhaps. Aha! Not so. Because, as the two men explained this stuff to me I began to think about something Yoko Jenkin told me before I even got here. What she told me seems to make so much more sense if I look at is through the idea of Nemawashi and the two ideas together promise to improve how I interpret everything and speak to everyone.

Yoko, my Japanese teacher in South Africa was the one who introduced me to the notion of subtlety in language and its paramount importance in Japan. She tried to explain to me the grammar rules for removing the subject form a sentence so 'I'm going to the shops' just becomes 'going to the shops' or even simply 'to the shops'. She said that saying absolutely everything in the sentence was mildly insulting as it insinuated that the listener could not work out these things for themselves. Some pretty subtle stuff. * These subtleties, which at the time just seemed to make Japanese conversation incredibly muddy and round-about, I now see are some of the elements of Nemawashi. That every word is groundwork. When Gunch and Watanabe said that Nemawashi is for saying difficult things, I think they mean, that is to say, Nemawashi is for everything! Because if you are constantly NOT saying something then the interpreter is constantly reading between the lines. It allows both speaker and interpreter never to have to go out on a limb and never face outright rejection of an idea or request. The subtlety gives speakers time to take stuff in and think about it and respond without offense. This might seem like quite a lot of work just to avoid words such as 'No' and for those of us who aren't hurt by 'No', perhaps it is a bit unnecessary. Here though 'No' is considered to be an aggressive word. A hurtful word. An enemy of the peace. For a culture that ascribes 'No' and its friends (the other negative words) such power, one can see why Nemawashi and talking around and around becomes a feasible way to communicate.

Sometimes I think of this mode as wonderful and artful. Its another example of how very deeply the respect and selflessness of Japan is entrenched. Other times I just find it irritating beyond words - generally when I come across new and unfamiliar Nemawashi tactics. Like 'Do you have a watch?' which doesn't mean, do you have a watch. It means 'What is the time?'. Hmmm... Or when I asked my supervisor 'Should I help you clean the classroom?' and he responded 'Maybe you don't have to' which it turns out, after months or guessing, means 'yes'. Ha! These situations are irritating.

Now I must counsel myself to be careful whilst learning Nemawashi and the Art Of Balanced Society Maintenance, not to consider it as better or worse than the way I am used to operating (A mistake I make often - thinking that I have been a total boob until now, and from now on, knowing this one new thing, I"ll be ace!). Nemawashi and the Art Of Balanced Society Maintenance is simply another mode, as different from what I am used to as the languages of English and Japanese themselves. Who knew how much difference and understanding was housed in the HOW? Hell!

*She also tried to make clear to me that present and future tense are in fact, the same tense - hence their conflation in Japanese (I still don't really understand this).

Bullying

2009-01-26T22:11:00.000+09:00

My friend works at a different high school in Mihara. I think I have mentioned before how rigorous the streaming is within my high school, well, the streaming happens school to school too with high, average or low academic academic schools. The kids write entrance exams to determine where they will go. If you go to a low or average academic high school your chances of going to university wane dramatically. Mine is a high academic school so kids are encouraged and motivated. By the sounds of it, at other schools, kids are just given up on, as this story will show. This might be why school kids are so stressed out. At every point in their academic career they are writing bloody entrance tests that, they are told, will change the course of their lives... and they actually do. Its hectic. My friend's school is low academic and the kids are more disobedient. By more disobedient I don't mean drugs and knives. But last week there was an incident that blew up into a full scale drama.

Teachers got wind of some bullying going on in the first year group, no one owned up so they decided to investigate. This involved cutting every period last Wednesday short by ten minutes so that at the end of the day there was a hour or so free. In this time, all the first year students were locked in their classrooms and called out one by one to be interviewed by a panel of senior teachers. When the interview was over they had to go home, missing whatever clubs or sports they had, so they wouldn't get to consort with any possible accomplices. My friend and her supervisor were discussing this bizarrely militant arrangement - her supervisor asking if this was how it was done in America. No, my friend said. In America you could see the bullies quite clearly: they were knifing people in the corridor. Oh, said her supervisor. Then my friend asked, tentatively, what would happen to the bullies when they were found. Would they, you know, get hit? Emotionally, yes, said her supervisor...how ominous.

I spoke with my friend again today and apparently seven boys have been apprehended. The charges were intimidation and stealing money from weedy kids. All seven said they had been receiving instructions from someone higher up (whether in the school or community it wasn't clear) and now the school is expelling them. Of course, stealing from and beating up little kids is not behaviour that should be encouraged. But expulsion? Really? They will have to go to night school now or find jobs, according to the supervisor. No second chances. When my friend asked if there was a school counselor and shouldn't they step in, she was told yes, there is counselor but their job is to protect the good students. So for seven 16 year old boys, that's it. Seems its all fun and games until someone, you know loses an eye or 1000 yen.

Playing Hookie

2009-01-24T00:19:00.001+09:00

Today I bunked the two periods after lunch with Gunch and his motorcycle chommie. We went to a swanky Italian resturaunt on the other side of town and ate at a leisurely pace, they drank wine. I wanted to but thought it would be pushing my luck to arrive back to school late and drunk. The meal was delicious – a small salad followed by a small helping of pasta with fresh mushrooms and parma ham. The main course was a little helping of osso bucco, a tiny medallion of steak, a square of silvery fish baked with carrots and tomatoes and an espresso cup of hot leek soup. Dessert was one strawberry, cream, almond icecream and a sliver of apple tart.

The men spoke about their respective work. Gunch mourned for the days when teachers were broad-minded people (the seventies apparently) and Mr Motorcross (Mr Yamamoto…I think!) told me that he likes his job because when he discusses it with his wife she doesn’t understand what he is talking about. Mr Yamamoto is a Christian (Shinto father, Christian mother) and is currently very interested in Jews – how they are different form Christians and what our ‘big book’ is called. I felt like such a sneak sponging such a fabulous lunch and being mostly unable to answer his questions in return.

my favourite class

2009-01-22T21:49:00.000+09:00

I have just finished teaching my favourite class. They are second year students and I normally only teach first year students. I have only taught them once before, just after I arrived; I remember it was stiflingly hot. What makes them my favourites is hard to categorize but the feeling was instantaneous when I first taught them. Their focus is absolute but more than that, I can feel that they are with me, not against me (anyone who has faced a pride of teenagers will know the visceral distinction). They are a smart class but not too smart – the really smart ones have been bogged down by their book knowledge whereas my favourites are still agile of mind, making them more dynamic than the really smart ones. Smarter than the smart ones. I can play with them. They are a joy.

So I was walking around my favourite classroom (because it houses my favourite class) and all of a sudden a sadness began to seep in like the leak at the bottom of a boat. I felt a slight sogginess initially through my socks but the sadness’ progress was steady and by the end of the lesson I was sloshing around, knee deep in it. Let me say here that it is not entirely unusual to have bizarrely intense feelings come over me here in Nippon. It happens on my bike or mid conversation or at home or whenever – one minute I am feeling thusly and the next minute – the converse of thusly. Its alright, proof of sanity rather than madness I think. As an extremely irritating hippie once advised me, I usually just ride the wave, babes. Today however it irked me and I wanted to know why I suddenly felt so sad. Here are my thoughts.

The sadness was about Hiroshima and the bomb. This in and of itself is not so strange, because it is a desperately sad thing. It is strange however that it happened in class and not say, last weekend when I was in Hiroshima city for a conference. I know that when I say the Hiroshima to people outside of Japan it must still carry the taste of the bomb and the tragedy but to me the name only signifies the place. Hiroshima is just a city now – no connotation, it is where I can go for better bars and shopping and conferences. This time round I even arranged to meet with someone at the A-bomb memorial because it is central and convenient. When I went there I barely looked at it, its significance did not even register.

Maybe the fact that it didn’t register must have registered because sadness seeds were surely sown. It was not coincidence either that the sadness happened when I was with my favourite class. In fact I'm certain that they triggered it. They trigger it partly, I think, because the last time I taught them in sticky July and August, the significance of where I was and what happened here in August 1945 was very present, exacerbated by my reading every bit of info about the bombing I could get my hands on. It was then that I began reading the series Barefoot Gen – a manga about the bombing and its aftermath. I’m still reading it now but I am wary of it. The simple, cartoony pictures have a way of getting under my skin, it’s very disturbing. I made the mistakes, at first, of reading it while eating, while sick and with company. Now I only read it when I am feeling in top physical and mental condition, away from any food or people. Yes, so in part I associate that class with that time and therefore with the book. But deeper than that, the feeling of joy they give me feels inextricably linked to the horror I feel about the bombing. Like they are a memorial - is that morbid? That they are there and happy and smart and that they are people - diverse, interesting people as much as anyone anywhere makes me think about the bomb. People who drop bombs cannot think of their targets with the affection I feel for my favourite class. If they did, they wouldn't drop bombs.

But of course you don't hint that any of this is going on. You just wander around and teach as per normal while all these wild feelings bump and squeeze inside.

india photos

2009-01-05T19:32:00.000+09:00

Hi.

I have posted photos from my trip to India here.

me towards mumbai

2008-12-18T20:53:00.001+09:00

All packed and ready to be off this island!
The mainland with other sights and smells and frights and delights awaits me.

Lets hope i don't get dysentery.
Peace out. x

J-Christmas

2008-12-15T18:16:00.000+09:00

On Christmas Day I have heard it is "traditional" for Japanese families to go to KFC and eat a whole lot of chicken. Roast chicken is traditional Christmas fare after all. This, and other familiar but distorted practices make up what it is like to have Christmas in Japan. I'm sure for people who celebrate Christmas with gusto and faith in their home countries, all this bizarro world Christmas stuff is more unnerving than it is for me. My Christmases are traditionally spent wishing I was Christian so that I could get presents and decorate trees. When on November first they start playing electronic carols in Pick n Pay, it means little more to me than the sudden abundance of chocolate mallow eggs. Even this isn't all that exciting because that's what Easter means to me too.

My school insisted that I give a Christmas themed lesson this week. They know I am Jewish just like they know I am South African but I suppose all white people are the same to my co-workers (in the same way that us whiteys lump all Asians in the same boat). So a Christmas week it will be! I went all-out making a convoluted board game in the shape of a Christmas tree and worked long hours making present shaped question cards with such questions as:
The baby Jesus was visited by three wise
a) goats
b) kings
c) angels
and
Santa Claus says
a) Ho ho ho
b) He he he
Finally the little Jewish girl who went to A.P.P.S who still lives inside of me can do crafts with green, read and gold paper!

The Santa questions in the game have proved to be no problem so far. Everyone here knows that elves work in workshops, not gnomes and that the big man says Ho ho ho in his jolly red suit. The Jesus questions have been a little more problematic. One class had no one in it who had even heard of Jesus Christ. Initially I was shocked but you know - fair dos I reckon - I don't know the names of any bigwig Shinto gods (I don't even know if gods is the right term). Why does Japan do Christmas with such gusto though? Its really big here, much bigger than in South Africa. Everyone puts lights up in the windows. Suddenly all the food on sale is in Christmas wrapping or Christmas shapes. The malls play Mariah Carey and Wham! hits. Why? I asked a fellow teacher and they said that Christmas has been around since the end of the war and is growing in popularity. At first I thought this was a revolting tragedy - that the country had it forced on them and had to learn to love it. But then again, it is quite lovable. I like the twinkly lights and the cinnamon flavoured...everything. Should I feel bad for the Japanese people who have to have Christmas or should I feel sorry for the Jesus whose birthday has been forgotten in amongst the shopping. Maybe its a bit grinchy to feel sorry or bitter either way. Everyone appears to be enjoying themselves, even me. The one thing I know I will never take part in, however many Kurisu masu I spend here is the Christmas cake phenomenon. Somewhere along the line Japan heard about Christmas cake and decided to make it their own...and a big deal. Like real Christians feel about the whole birth of Jesus thing, I think that's how people here feel about Christmas cake. They are everywhere and they are not the stodgy brown fruit loaves with rock icing I think of when I play Christmas cake association. These cakes are enourmous white flurries - there is enough soft icing on them to fashion into ski slopes and they are decorated with lace and glitter and holly and and and. They also cost upward of 10 000 Yen...so about R1000.00. I don't care how delicious they look, I hope I never spend that much on holiday sugar.

The Christmas in Japan phenomenon (and believe me, it is rather phenomenal) is a crude but in no way unique example of how Japan has adopted something Western and run with it. Western isn't even the right term because Christmas here is thought of as American specifically and this is the point I am trying desperately to get to (thanks for bearing with me). Why does Japan embrace all that is American? Why don't they despise America the way the French despise America? One could say they have more reason than anybody. But they don't. They lurve America. It's a question that smells complicated - one part cinnamon to two parts uranium. Hmmmm... Any ideas?

gunch update

2008-12-13T00:22:00.000+09:00

Just to let you all know that Gunch is decidedly on the mend! He went to the doctor who diagnosed him with nothing more than a bit of high blood pressure. His cough is nearly gone and he is wearing a natty new winter suit.

On Monday he was called into the principal's office (I think its ridiculous that a man of 68...yes, he is 68 now, can be called into a principals office). He thought he was going to get kakked on for smoking on the property or having his motorcross buddies round for tea in the staffroom but, it turns out, the principal just wanted to make sure he was going to keep teaching next year. And, he told me he had said that, reluctantly...he would. Hehe, he's back on board! I am so delighted. He told me that its not official yet, just between him and me. I thought it would be ok to let ya'll know, what with the internet being a most discreet place.

So don't tell anyone. But my friend Gunch is staying. Yipee.

mgmt at the shangri-la

2008-12-02T20:10:00.000+09:00

I arrived at 19:07. The lobby was empty and there was no sound coming from the quilted velvet doors. Smugly assuming I was early I almost crossed the road to grab a bite to eat. Lucky I didn't, that would have been cocky! The concert had started, of course, at seven on the tit and I was not the first but literally the last to arrive. As I slipped through the padded doors I was confronted with the hundreds of backs and arses of a crowd already two songs in dammit! I couldn't believe I was stuck at the back of another concert! I wanted to let my elbows guide me to the front but alas Japan has made me too polite! Still, no biggie. The venue was tiny so even at the back you could see the writing on their Tshirts. The lead singer WhatisFucknosenberg or whatever is really really sexy in that way that ugly people manage to be only because they are really arrogant - which he was! I fell for him instantly. He is ugly because he is pale and scrawny and stooped. He also has the worst hair I have ever seen. Of course, its supposed to look that way and it says much about his innate deep sexiness that he still looks good under a long curly mullet with middle parting curtains to boot. Absolutely disgusting. And as he sweated bucketloads his mullet got longer and longer sticking to his neck and down his back.

The others were just hairy - not sexy at all. They looked like cave men or engineering students. The keyboard player, it seems had made some effort to look like...something, by wearing tacky plastic sunglasses. All in all their appearance was not overwhelming - they looked like a fun but kak South African band playing at Sunningdale hotel.

They played the whole of Oracular Spectacular - Kids being the highlight of course. Really fucking cool! Everyone went mad. Then 8pm had arrived and they had played the whole album and that was that. Lights up, roadies up to walk the guitars off. I went to the bar to get my one free drink and everyone else who had had their one free drink before curtain-up flocked out to buy the ugly tour thsirts. Three variants competed to be the ugliest tshirt design available, not just in the venue, but I suspect, on the whole island. As I stood in line amongst Osaka's horn rimmed uber-hip, clutching my free drink, I realised (as did the horn-rimmeds too I think, on some level) hang on, I dont want one of these ugly starchy t shirts in plastic packets from under a tressle table - I want the shirt the singer was wearing! Old and sweat drenched - it might have been blue or really old black - anyone's guess. I want that one! hmph. I bought one from the cardboard box under the tressle table. Design A. The black one with wizard purple bubble writing "mgmt" across the boobs, and a cutesy lion with purple paws. Sounds sif? It is. Better than T shirt B though, a clip-art hot dog drinking a beer or T shirt C which was lime green - I dont care if it had the best font, lime green is a crime. Like the hair, the shirts are dead ironic you see and I want to be as ironic at Whatis Fucknosenburg. I will sweat prodigiously into my new tshirt and make it old.

I had forgotten how heavy handed Japanese bar ladies can be with the hard tack - by the time I had downed it, bought my t shirt and been spat out into the street I was proper pissed. In the middle of Osaka. Where would I find a bed in the megalopolis? I was lucky that it was night time and I couldn't see quite how mega this lopolis really was, otherwise I might have cried.

capsule hotel - driected by Luc Besson

2008-12-02T20:06:00.000+09:00

The area of Namba lies in the middle of The Osaka JR loop line. You would think this would make it very easy to get to but alas the opposite was true and it took ages to get there. On and off trains for hours whilst time ticked toward midnight. Finally I found the right stop and climbed the grubby station stairs into the hubbub of Namba. Namba is loveland. Love hotels everywhere. At night they light up and look the furthest thing from seedy, they look like magical castles or shining churches. Some have neon sign cherry blossoms floating up their ten storey exterior, some have massive inflatable creatures outside. My favourite one, a mint green chapel shaped thing had millions of fake flowers bursting out of every window and the door. I don't think Japan knows from kitsch or, at least, doesn't think of it as something bad and to be avoided. I have learned to stop worrying and love the kitsch.

Tonight I was not going to on of these temples of excess which only make economic and moral sense to couples, I was going to the soberly titled Namba Capsule hotel - an unusual capsule hotel in that it allows women (on certain floors). I found it squeezed between all the pink and florescence on a tiny side street. Inside and out it was the opposite of love land. It was all mustard carpeting and peeling wall paper. The concierge was a gruff and shabby old man with a shiny head fringed with bristly tufts. He eyed me sceptically. Had I been to one of these before he asked? No, I admitted I hadn't. Hmmm. Was I a foreigner? Yes, I said, thinking that much was obvious. Hmmmmmm....I could see him debating whether to let me stay. I wasn't sure if he thought I would be prissy and report him to some guide book authority or be a tourist and destroy the reclusive anonymity the guests desired by running amok down the corridors, drinking and taking photos. I tried to pull a face that suggested I would do neither of these things (what face is that exactly, i wonder now). It worked and he handed me a grubby key that opened one locker downstairs for my shoes and one upstairs for the rest of my stuffu. The capsule itself didnt have a lock. This would have worried me if I had been in any other country in the world.

In the lift I could barely contain my excitement. A capsule hotel! My own capsule! I couldn't wait to see it. Stepping out of the lift I was confronted first with a bank of blue metal lockers and behind them a dimly lit corridor. The capsule mouths opened straight onto the corridor - some were unoccupied and open, others had their brown blinds down, their inhabitants already asleep or doing whatever else one does in a capsule. Read? Shoot up? Mine - number 317 was on the bottom row right at the end of the passage. I clambered in and pulled down the blind. Feeling around the moulded plastic walls i found the light and flicked it on. Wow! It was my own sci-fi cell. The plastic was off white as was the bedding. It was old but clean and starchy. The dimensions were less like a coffin and more like the interior of an economy car - small indeed but not claustrophobic and to further assuage any fear of suffocation there was a small fan silently circulating the air. Along the one wall the plastic bubbled out to form a narrow shelf. At the foot of the bed the plastic bulged down housing a small tv whose remote was dangling below on a rubbery chord. There was also a tiny mirror and a digital alarm clock set into the wall. All this luxury for 200 Zed a Rands. I was so happy! Lying in my pod sipping water. I watched tv quietly for a bit, there was some space anime movie showing which complemented the situation perfectly. I could hear people in other capsules turning over, coughing and fiddling with their phones. It was comforting to hear them but never see them. It all felt extremely futurist and dystopian - storyboarded in the seventies or with the seventies in mind. Before going to sleep I nipped out to shower in the bathroom at the end of the corridor. There, as in the pod there was everything you would get in a regular hotel, just utilitarian and small . A shower box, a basket of sterilized hairbrushes, a box of single service toothbrushes in packets, a hair dryer, shampoo and soap. Little basins to spit your little toothpaste into and little stools to sit on while drying your hair.

In the morning it was still pitch black in the capsule. I turned on the yellow light, got dressed and fixed my face in the tiny mirror. I then went down to the lobby where the no-frills complementary breakfast of boiled eggs toast and coffee was being enjoyed by the guests - all of them skinny and middle aged, all of them smoking, burping and farting. I sat and ate with them. We ignored each other together. By daylight the love hotels admitted their seediness. The glamour gone, I headed back into the station.

Homelessness and Liberty

2008-12-02T20:03:00.000+09:00

The night at Capsule Hotel Namba had made me feel very out-of-this world. Everyone I have spoken to about Osaka finds it to be a big city. I found this too. They do not however, think of it as alien. Which I did. I felt so foreign and disassociated the next morning, as I headed back into the train intestines, I might as well have been in space.

I got off at a station that, according to my Lonely Planet, was stone's throw from Liberty Osaka Human Rights Museum. When you are in a train you could be anywhere in the country (squint a bit and you could be anywhere in the world). Outside this particular station though, I felt nowhere in Japan. Not anywhere I had been or seen before. It was dirty. The chicken wire flanking the tracks was hung with debris and a powdery brown with years of pollution and neglect. The museum, which should have been looming in front of me was nowhere to be seen so I decided to penetrate the area for a few blocks and see what was what. Everywhere on the street were little shabby stalls made of blue plastic sheeting. Some of the stalls had plastic on the ground in front of them too on which were assorted items which, I guessed, were for sale. Old video tapes, broken shoes, small grubby plastic purses. Stall after stall of worthless tsatkes. It looked like a street-long garage sale that was selling stuff that came from a home too poor to have a garage. Ten minutes walk into the area and I found street after street to be the same. Concrete buildings that wept black goo from their cornices and in front of them the blue stalls. For miles and miles in every direction. There were also more dogs than I had yet seen in this country and they were not the precious, groomed little handbag dogs that belong to fancy women in sunglasses. They were big and baleful township braks. Some were roaming slowly through the clutter of stalls and some were shut up in chicken wire cages between the buildings. Some sat at the feet of men who wore overalls of pistachio green I recognised as construction wear. The men, like the dogs were baleful, slow, innumerable and indiscernible from one another. They sat and smoked or crossed the streets without apparent purpose. This was not the first time I had seen this many people on the streets of a Japanese city but it was certainly the first time I had seen so many people without a destination. They were clearly not going anywhere. They were nowhere.

I have become used to being stared at here. It is impossible to slip under the radar because I cannot 'be Japanese' in appearance, however much I try to be in behaviour. In this derelict neighbourhood I was more conspicuous than I have ever been; wearing my white coat (which is inexplicably still bright white - it must be magic) and I literally shone , reflecting light and otherness against the grot. I found a way out of the maze of shacks - I had given up pretending they were commerce ventures of sorts and accepted them as what they were - the first informal housing I had found in the country and these sad, sad men my first homeless in Japan. Toothless, dirty. Smelly. A taxi found me on a main street lined with petrol stations and whisked me off to Liberty Osaka; which wasn't that far away distance wise, but that it had trees and playgrounds and public amenities like post offices around it, made it a world away. In the taxi I tried to work out why I had felt so threatened. I was from South Africa man. I can do homeless, I can do poverty. I'm not a naive first-world baby who cries when she sees a dog...or a man...foraging through garbage. Has four months in Japan made me soft? Yeah, so the men had stared at me. But by now, I should be used to that - everyone here stares. No one had approached me or tried to mug me or anything. They had done nothing but stare, so why was I so freaked?

The Museum is manned by volunteers - little old men and littler ladies in nylon waistcoats. They were very kind to me. They gave me a walk about headset that provided English commentary and they tag-teamed me so that I was never alone in the otherwise deserted rooms. The exhibits are divided into twelve sections. Twelve sectors of Japanese society that have had their rights infringed upon and, in some cases, that continue to be marginalised. The Ainu, Okinawan first peoples, Koreans in Japan, Gays and Lesbians, people with AIDS, women, the disabled, victims of pollution and Minamata disease, Hansen's disease survivors, Buraku and the homeless. In past posts I have written effusively about Japan's advanced-ness, the nation's progressive practices with regards to the aged and the sick. I have seen the monuments to war and peace in Hiroshima. I suppose that any country and its policies turn out to be putrid if you scratch the surface. Seeing these twelve exhibits completely shattered my idea of Japan as a land of boundless compassion. I found out about Eugenics, extreme racism and modern high-tech discrimination based on ancient feudal kak. I learned about people crippled by hazardous chemical fuck-outs or wars who the government then ignore or worse, ship off to die somewhere with no infrastructure where no one will see or smell them.

The lowlight of the whole experience was the section on homelessness in Japan, Osaka in particular. The area in which I had got lost an hour or so before, it turns out, is called Kamagasaki. It has for generations been the place where day labourers gather and get work. Working a day in construction or on the docks gets you a stamp in a little passport type book. That stamp is then presented at a government office and you get a small wage. With these wages men would be able to pay a day's rent in a hostel - all those grubby grey buildings that weep muck from the windows. Problem is, with Japan's ageing populous, thousands of day labourers are now too old to labour. If they don't work they don't get money and if they don't get money they cant pay a night's rent. So instead of living in the buildings they now live outside them, in the blue plastic shacks. The scores of men I saw doing nothing were waiting for work that day or maybe, at ten a.m they were already waiting till the next day. Apparently there are 30,000 day labourers in Kamagasaki nearly all men and nearly all over 50. What I had seen now made such horrible sense. I thought again about why I had been so frightened there. Maybe it was fear mixed with embarrassment - it's bad enough being a tourist anywhere but to be so obvious a tourist around people who maybe didn't want to be looked at?

just a trailer

2008-12-02T19:53:00.000+09:00

Hi guys! Just got back from a 24-hour mini-adventure in Osaka. I have so much to write about! Look forward to blogs on the following: mgmt, capsule hotels, love hotels, IKEA, homeless people in japan, salarymen and Christmas & Japanese conspicuous consumption.

gunch

2008-11-22T10:20:00.001+09:00

I dread Gunch coming into the teacher's room nowadays. How can that be? He is my closest ally at school, a deep and funny man - charming and kind. He enjoys teaching me and he does it very well. He always remembers to ask where I am going on the weekends, brings me pictures and books about the place I am heading for and the following Monday he asks sincerely about my adventures. He is my teacher and he is my friend.

But ever since the night he told me that his health is not good I have started to notice how sickly he seems. I keep thinking back to the Gunch before he told me he wasnt well. Did he have the same black bubbling cough? Was his suit always so tatty looking? It has always been chalky and wrinkly, since I met him in the heat of summer, but did it hang so limply then? When I met him he was an eccentric and natty man, now he looks dirty and unkempt. Has he always mumbled to himself quite so much? I dont remember. I simultaneously attend to his every splutter and berate myself for doing so, invading his privacy by eavesdropping on his body.
It doesnt help that, because of the school renovations we go down and then up four flights of stairs every time need to get to class. When Gunch and I make the walk together we stop on the landings between every floor to look at the trees and the beautiful mountain. He needs those few minutes between floors and the least I can do is play into the distraction of the view. It also doesnt help that at the end of every class Gunch goes to the field next to the school and has a smoke. He smokes the strongest cigarettes available.

The students think Gunch is funny. Sometimes they laugh with him but sometimes they are laughing at him too: swooning once he turns his back to show their friends that yes, they can smell the sharp sourness of cigarettes on his suit. Laughing when he writes something incorrectly on the board. I can see them do this. They make no effort to hide it from me. It is heartbreaking. I want to shake them and try to explain to them - Dont you see! This silly old man is the most important teacher you will ever have.

I might be exaggerating Gunch's condition because I have become so acutely aware of it. I try to act as if the wracking cough and dripping nose do not bother me when he sits with me for our lessons but I know that there must be micro-expressions of disgust that flash across my face. If he sees them they must be so hurtful I hate myself for having them. I hate that I can't genuinely ignore his current condition.

It might just be a winter cold (I did ask and he said he often gets chesty in winter). Every day I silently appraise him - is he looking better than yesterday? Sounding better than yesterday? It is this new layer of our interaction, my constant and uncontrollable appraisal that makes me dread our time together. Gunch's frailty is making me see him differently and judge myself for seeing him differently. I hate it. I wish things could go back to the way they were when I never suspected he was sick. Then, Gunch was a constant whereas now I have confront the fact that I might not have him forever. It is a horrible thing to face.

sumo

2008-11-19T19:40:00.000+09:00

Fukuoka, the biggest city on the island of Kyushu is ugly. The buildings are all prefab, there are malls of obscene proportions and mustard and tomato sauce coloured kombinis on every corner. Perhaps in summer the trees lining the street soften the man-made edges somewhat but when I went they were naked and scraggly, shivering in the drizzle. The Sumo stadium is a brown toad squatting across three city blocks looking up into the commercial sprawl. If the sprawl was grey liquid from some sci-fi volcano, full of urban debris running in rivulets towards the sea, the toads fat concrete arse would dam it up pretty effectively. Around the stadium are what feel like acres of concrete where people can gather and chat, take photos, buy stuff and sumo spot.

Inside the stadium was organised pandemonium. The foyer had a grid stalls that forced the the throngs to toddle between them, buying stuff. Omiyage is a Japanese custom I am particularly fond of - if ever you travel somewhere you are expected to bring back some small tsatske for everyone you work with. These tsatskes are called omiyage - a souvenier. They are often a foodstuff; a biscuit or jam or cracker and because its customary to buy like fifty of them, they are sold in big batches, individually wrapped then boxed beautifully. They are also cheap. A region or city will have omiyage that relates to its own sites or traditions or cuisine. The island of Miyajima has momiji manju, a maple leaf shaped cookie stuffed with custard; Setoda, an island not far from Mihara has mikan jelly pockets, little cups of delicious mikan segments suspended in clear bitter jelly. Dogo, where I went a few weeks ago has a kebab of three coloured mochi balls - brown, green and yellow. In Onomichi you can get a beautiful red box with four helpings of Onomichi speciality ramen noodles. Here, the omiyage were obviously Sumo themed. I bought sumo biscuits for my colleagues and little boiled sumo sweets for my language partner. As well as omiyage, stalls were selling official sumo memorabilia including the equivalent of a sumo wrestlers autograph: his handprint in red ink with his name calligrafied across it. Unlike other sports (I am specualting here, seeing as I think sumo was my first real live sporting event) the athletes do not sneak in through another entrance only to be seen in glorious play and then sneak out again with their omniscience intact. The sumos come in through the front doors just like everyone else. They mingle and get snapshots taken, they are among the crowds but in no danger of losing power and prestige because of this, their appearance and attitude make them utterly astonishing to behold, godlike. Tall and wide wearing traditional kimonos and wooden sandals. There hair is slicked into tight buns or, if they are top players their hair is glued into a bell shaped swoop with a small knot at the top. Maybe it is their diet, something makes their skin glow - they radiate health and strength. Their faces are smooth (the fat having ironed out any crease) they look like beautiful deities capable love and benevolence if you please them, horrible violence if you dont . After holding babies for about a hundred pictures taken with cell phones their trainers usher them to private rooms on either the left or right of the stadium. The sumo ring has an east and west side, wrestlers are assigned a side and are kept separate from those on the other side so as not to see their competitor until they are in the ring. They emerge from their room two bouts before their own and march down a red carpeted aisle, now only in the famous loin cloth and girder which is jewel coloured satin - brown, black, turqoise or purple. They sit on a small bench alongside the ring and watch the match before their own. The match build up and ceremony take far longer than the fighting itself. Competitors climb onto the raised mud ring and pick up a handful of salt which they throw dramatically across the ground. They then do those astonishing lef lifts bringing their thihgs up to their ears and down again - boom! They pace back and forth, go back into their corner to pow-wow with their trainers. They look at eachother and pace some more. A referee in a sumptuous robe shoos them onto their respective sides and calls for the bout to begin. They sqaut down, their legs shaking with readiness - they must leap up at exactly the same moment and engage, if one jumps before the other they restart, from the salt throwing all the way through. A successful start entails the two men leaping at and grabbing hold of one another in knotted locks that range in appearance from the amorous, to the deadly to the extremely awkward. Even a layman like myself could tell a good wrestler from a bad one. The bad ones writhe and jiggle while the strong ones keep as still as possible, waiting for their opponent to imbalance themselves. Once this happens the strong wrestler will move with lightning speed tipping the other man out of the ring or throwing him to the ground - the loser is the wrestler who first places any body part outside the ring or touches the ground with anything other than the soles of his feet. Sometimes the force of the final throw will send them both flying into the crowd (the closest seats are on the ground a treacherous meter or so away). The on-site ref then has to confer with four or five ringside refs as to who touched outside the ring first. The winner is declared - and the pair leave the ring, the loser first with his head hung low, the winner loiters arond for a bit, puts his shiny robe back on and saunters out to meet his fans clamouring in the lobby.

for sumo pics go here.

tough tough toys for tough tough boys

2008-11-15T00:52:00.000+09:00

About twenty years ago Dad took Paul Wilson to watch the bridge at Wits being swung into place. His girl children disappointed him by showing little to no interest in the event. Perhaps he rented Paul like he rented Kate and David Savage - to have a sprocket at an event where one feels compelled to have one. Beks and I didnt even fake an interest when Dad came home bursting with stories about cranes and hoists and engineering mastery. Sorry Dad, I hope our disinterest wasnt utterly shattering.

I was reminded today of my genetic (gender-ic?) crane watching deficeincy when the construction going on at school, that has until now been carrying on without grandeur or obstruction to justice, reached a whole new level. Overnight it seems, two enourmous cranes have been brought right into the belly of the school. All cars and bikes have been relocated to make way for them and all but the most important building corridors have been cordoned off because the cranes have to operate over them and might crash into them any second. Until now the construction was both silent and invisible; it was like magic elves were fixing the school with magic and we could teach without noise or distraction. Today the cranes changed all that. Every single classroom has a view of the cranes and in every class every boy has their head turned towards the window, dumbstruck. They cannot tear their eyes away from the cranes. The hoisting and pivoting. They all gasp with terror and exhiliration as bundles
of scaffolding swing to within inches of the glass. I reckon I could spontaneously combust or spontaneouly stand on a desk and take my shirt off or and it wouldnt register; they just love to watch the cranes. Its not just the students either - the male teachers are equally mesmerised; physically in the classrooms dummying through teaching until the bell when they can rush out with the boys and get as close as dammit to the action. The crashing and grinding of cogs and billowing clouds of construction dust do not dissuade indoors. Far from it, they seem to be considered added bonuses.

I am trying to work out what causes the joy in boys who watch machines. Is it the machinery? What about the machinery exactly? Is it the kinetics? It is the horrible metal noises? Maybe it is that construction vehicles with their size and power are today's dinosaurs, simultaneously horrifying and exciting.

I watched for a little bit this morning. It was fun yes, but my admiration lacked focus. Sometimes I was thinking about dinosaurs, sometimes noticing the light and sometimes how impossibly clean the machines were. I also noticed the style of the construction workers' uniforms: they wear loose green pants that taper into four button cuffs mid-calf and ninja boots with the big toe separated from the others. so beautiful. I covet them.

After ten minutes I had seen as much as I wanted and I went inside to read. I had tried, but I couldnt fool myself into the frenzy, the endless fascination being experienced by the boy people.

the colours of autumn

2008-11-09T20:53:00.000+09:00

the weekend was cold and grey. On Sunday I had a delicious breakfast of scrambled eggs and Hokkaido camembert on thick white toast. The instant coffee could have done with a makeover but no matter; I certainly wasnt venturing out of my cocoon to find the real deal. Celia had left her halogen heater in my apartment; it kills two birds with one stone giving off gentle heat and lighting whatever room its in with Amelie tones. I had watched a movie earlier in the week with Audrey Tatou in it - A Very Long Engagement - and fallen in love with the soldier they called sunflower. So much so that after my toast and eggs I watched another film with the actor in it; this one also in French but with Japanese subtitles - luckily there wasn't much talking at all so I could kind of figure out what was going on... I was actually doing pretty well right up until the end the person who I assumed was the mother sits with the person I assumed was her son in a car. She tells him something that devastates him, he goes pale and cries and then wanders around alone on the beach. and then he kills himself. Clearly whatever she had to say was quite appalling.

After the movie I drew for the first time in ages, tentatively and badly. The disappointment of this was enough to drive me out of the heater's glow and into the city where I found a park that had looked kind of nice but turns out is very very nice. There were gangs of seven year olds playing soccer and mums and dads and an old couple watching the central fountain. I must take pictures of the autumn leaves before they are gone; the park was resplendent with them. I felt very cinematic walking through the trees alone; watching the families and being contemplative. On my way home I saw the old couple from the fountain walking towards the car. The old lady tripped and fell face first into the tarmac. The old man helped her up quickly while I waved my arms around guppying "Are you ok?". Once on her feet again they turned in unison and gave me the dolby hairy eyeball, both of them glaring and shuffling away. Was this because I saw the lady fall and added insult to injury by drawing attention to it? Perhaps they are members of the small but vocal conservative nationalist group that drive around in black SUVs on a saturday morning hollering "Long live the emperor!" "Foreigners, go home!" through a loud hailer duct-taped to the roof. Who knows. They got into his zippy little silver sports car, an unusual car in this part of the world and zoomed off. On my way home I saw the car parked outside the hospital. The incident frightened me for some reason, that I had not helped them and that they had looked so hateful and I didnt know why.

The cold air has been so clear the past few days. Looking at the mountains in the distance, one feels like every detail is more detailed than one has seen before, like the whole world right now is being viewed through a macro-lens. The evening sky is also breathtaking - seven different kinds of clouds in a myriad of colours - pink, white, butter, blue, green and black. Yesterday and again today as I walked out of my office at the end of the day along the fourth floor corridor I could see the sun on my right and the moon on my left, both of them white and the size of grapefruits, one rising and one sinking but for that moment on the same plain in the already busy sky. I will always love a Jo'burg storm sky more than any other sky, but these ones are pretty damn good.

Koyo

2008-11-07T18:46:00.001+09:00

Koyo is one of those Japanese words for which there is no English equivalent. It means, 'to view autumn leaves' - long O sound like apple core. like the sound a crow makes. Ko yo.

The leaves here arent playing around, they really are so beautiful! I must take pictures at my new favourite spot (glimpsed a week ago and investigated today). It is a gully running along side the water - you descend the stone steps and find yourself in a little public garden with benches underneath trees that have been trained to wind around the post and lintel of a pergola. From the gully the street and concrete of the city are invisible but you can see trees and leaves and misty mountains. Its really lovely.

Yesterday while I had my lunch a man came and sat next to me. I asked him if my cigarette bothered him (I can do that in Japanese!!) and he looked blank and then said "Chinese!" pointing to himself. Well that was that, we had no language at all in common. But we sat together all the same. He had brought chips for the beady greedy pigeons that were milling about and together we fed them and watched them impose their beady-eyed twitchy hierarchies on eachother. Pigeons really are quite hilarious.

Food here also changes with the season. Like anywhere, the summer fruits have become ridiculously expensive and autumn stuff - naatjies, persimmons and other unknowables - are coming into the shops. Drinks and sweets also change. The cold coffee in the vending machine is hot now and a good thing too! They are nice to hold. There is a boiled sweet brand called Chelsea that is green tea flavoured but, I now find out, only for summer. For autumn, the shops stock Chelsea's fall assortment: coffee and hot milk tea flavour . Yep, ceylon milk tea flavoured sweeties. they are delicious! In the office today my supervisor drew a fish for me that he says is a popular autumn meal - they are long and pointy nosed and cheap. They come cooked whole, skin all burnt and crunchy; I had one today for dinner. All its internal stuff was still intact and infused the meat with such a bitter black bile that it was inedible - possibly my first truly kak meal in Japan.

The cheap stockings that you can buy in Kombinis are now thick tights in plum and mustard and brown whereas before you found gauzy flesh coloured ones. Everyone and everything changes with the leaves it seems. In the spirit of autumnyness I went and bought myself a deep green woolen cardigan...that i promtply spilt oily ramen juice on. Bugger it! It was wool! Not knowing what Vanish looks like in this country, I might have to sew a felt bunny (in a warm autumnal hue) over the blotch. The white coat however, is doing well! I have worn it twice and managed to keep it away from food, beer and bike spokes.

I have been told the best leaves will be in about two weeks time so Im planning to go to either Miyajima or a park on a small island nearby called Setoda. Woudlnt one of you love to join me? I can offer you a futon, all expenses paid ferry ride to the Park and some delicious milk tea sweets. Please come and look at leaves with me.

for more autumn pics go here

a sadness

2008-11-01T16:31:00.000+09:00

Last I joined Gunch again at his local - Machan's Okonomiyaki shop. When we arrived there were two customers, rather dapper looking old men in suits who were, of course, 67 (Gunch likes to tell me the age of everybody he knows, especially if they are sixty seven). Gunch had brought with him a huge bag of what looked like unopened pistachios. As he passed huge handfuls over to Machan's wife, he told me quietly and proudly that the two dapper customers used to be pro baseball players. To me this made them seem extra dapper. I had had the good sense to bring some South African tourist brochures with me this time and the baseball players poured over them paying particular interest to The Kruger Park. Pictures of lions being watched by tourists are always a winner.

Whereas before Gunch and I had shared an okonomiyaki, this time I had one to myself, Gunch being more interested in Sake. I wolfed it down unaware that it was not going to be the only thing I was presented with. I was subsequently presented with a pile of persimmons and the nuts I had thought were pistachios but weren't anything of the sort - Machan had heated them in a hot pan with salt and oil and showed me how to crack the papery shell to reveal an oily green kernel that tasted somewhere between a mielie and a peanut. When I declined beer (my stomach now fully distended and groaning) I was plied with umechu, a sweet plum wine served over ice.

Gunch drank steadily and when it was time to leave I was glad that we were headed in the same direction because he seemed at risk of toppling over. We must have made an odd pair shuffiling through the autumn evening towards the station; a gaijin girl in her new white coat pushing a bicycle and a sixty seven year old man fumbling his coat pockets for his cigarettes. Gunch has never smoked in front of me before but tonight he seemed not to care, he puffed away telling me stories about Mihara - how he had watched the elaborate construction of the shinkansen, how he new every nook and cranny of the town, his favourite bits and bits that had been destroyed by progressing industries. A few blocks before we parted ways (he was going to stay with his 92 year old father who lives not far from the station) Gunch told me that he might not be at Mihara high school next year. Why not I asked, shocked. He mumbled about not being welcome at the school, too old he said and also mentioned that he was not very well. Seeing him standing there in the dark, a bit sozzled and coughing up his 20 maybe 30 a day habit I was dreadfully sad, bur not surprised. I said "what will I do without you?" and he laughed and shrugged. Then we went our separate ways into the night, him probably unaware of how seriously I meant my question.

Its not that I hate my school. But Gunch certainly is the the best thing about it. My days would be much more grey, my japanese would plummet and my intake of experiences would taper off without his instruction and advice. Also I remember Nana, the lady that worked for my family my entire life, till I was seventeen saying that once you retire you begin to die. With nothing to do and no bus or train to catch first thing in the morning, you lose your focus and life beings to slip through your fingers. I fear this would happen to Gunch. He still has so much to teach the students, to teach me! Its selfish, but I need him. I dont want him to go away.

So I hope it was just the booze talking, but I fear it wasnt. I can picture all too clearly the principal hatching a plan to give this wonderful old man the boot. What Gunch's revelation has done is make me work harder for our lessons. Whereas before they were a certainty I now see them as a precious thing that like world oil, is running out.

.

postcards

2008-10-30T18:17:00.000+09:00

I have been teaching the second years how to write letters and postcards. As an exercise they had to write a postcard to me that they could drop in a cardboard postbox outside the Teacher's room. The advanced English class had to imagine themselves in 2010, writing to me just after the world cup (in which Japan had made the final but been narrowly defeated). The basic English class had to write to me telling em about their hobbies and daily activities (apparently what separates the advanced and not-so-good is their ability to imagine in a second language - an interesting thought).

Even though it was work for marks, I still got a kick receiving a tonne of mail this week. I felt like a total celebrity. These are two of the best bits of news I got form the students, the first one being an advanced learner imagining 2010 and the second being a basic learner...

Dear Jemma
How are you?
I am the best baseball player in Japan these days. And I got married.
Love Tatsuya

Dear Jemma
Today I broke my shoulder.
Love Nagata

.

white coat

2008-10-30T18:06:00.000+09:00

I just bought a white coat. I think this might have been a stupid idea. Its beautiful yes, a double breasted trench coat that fits like a dream and it was on sale for 25% of its original price. Fitting into clothes here just gives me such a kick; when I put it on I think I 'oohed' audibly. Its really so very very attractive. I can picture it with a scarf and beret. Plus I do need a coat - its getting mighty chilly here. Still all this does not change the fact that its white. Off white. Lands End might call it stone. And its dry clean only.

Have I matured enough to live in a white coat? Can I not spill soup on it or get it stuck in the spokes of my bicycle? Will I be at the dry cleaners every week with some new stain thus negating its low low price?

What a conundrum. I'll keep you posted.

The Spider's Thread

2008-10-29T18:17:00.000+09:00

A few weeks ago Gunch witnessed me trying valiantly to teach Keisuke The Lion King, and thought I deserved a taste of my own kusuri. Since, he has been having me learn ( with the intention of reciting) a famous Japanese story called 'Kumo no Ito' - The Spider's Thread. Well, it started out as just a bit of fun, he would read to me and have me repeat the onomatopoeia and easy stuff. I didnt realise things were going to get serious...

Last week was when things took a turn for the worse when, during our lesson, Gunch produced a 'simplified' copy for me. to read. out loud!! Kanji and all!! If you look at the picture above you will have some indication of the Herculean nature of this. We battled through it with me growing ever frustrated and him getting so excited not because I was making any headway but because he so loves the story and the nuances of the words and the satisfaction of translating. He's a dedicated thinker, a real teacher. He would come every day with an updated glossary of new verbs or adjectives or a story that explained a certain turn of phrase. I was in agony because I didn't understand a bloody thing and I wasn't retaining a word he said. The harder I tried, the less successful I became. And my brave face just made it worse because any glimpse of enthusiasm on my part just fuelled him into a greater frenzy of explanation and research. Reading the folio over time became harder, not easier because he was scribbling all over my it with pencil, referencing meaning and pronunciation - obscuring the words I couldn't read with even more words I couldn't read!!

I was feeling guilty and angry, Jesus, did he honestly think I was capable of learning the goddam thing! It was all his fault. It was all my fault. He wouldn't give up and I couldn't give up. It felt to me like this project could be the end of our strange and delicate friendship. To make matters worse he would always absentmindedly end up going home with my pencil.

Today he arrived at my desk with a fresh new copy of the folio that he had reprinted - free from scribbles. He expected that I, like him, had been working on the story all weekend. Handing me the new copy benevolently he asked me to read. I cursed myself for having been so rude about his pencil scribbles.. Without them I had to remember pronunciation all by myself. Now, I was sure, I would be exposed for the revolting fraud I am, I had done NO work at all. He would be hurt and I would be ashamed...grimly I began reading.

Much to our combined suprise and delight, I did it!! Sure, I butchered the thing, but I got through it and even remembered a dozen or so kanjii without prompting!! It was a glorious endorsement of my capability to learn the taal. Somehow, his lessons had managed to get stuff to stick. He knew what he was doing all right. I was so proud of myself and so grateful I teared up. Most of all I was so happy to have pleased my teacher. Its motivated me to make him even happier so I just spent the afternoon working on The Spider's Thread...when I should have been making lesson plans.

I still have a long way to go with the story and Japanese in general, 99 percent I'd say. But I had thought I was nowhere.

Actually I'm one percent of the way there! I hope Gunch will never suspect how resentful I was of him last week and that one day he will have some idea of how grateful I am.

the archival and the incidental

2008-10-27T20:13:00.000+09:00

Sorry about the no-writey.

I got my re-contracting papers on friday last week. It was quite a wake-up call. Coz I'm having marvellous fun but this is, I suspect, in part owed to the fact that I believe time to be suspended. While I'm here whooping it up, all you loved ones are in little glass bottles, your faces frozen in the expressions I last remember. Getting the re-contracting papers (and celebrating my three month in Japan anniversary today - hip hip hooray) is time, rudely mentioning to me that it is marching by.

Time moving on should be no problem, or at least no worry, being as it is such an inevitable and irreversible phenomenon. But it worries me here because it feels like I'm not doing anything with it! I'm not learning new things or making new memories (I know this sounds like utter rubbish but bear with me on my anniversary). If I look back through the weeks the only things that spring immediately to mind are sitting at home on the internet, sitting at my desk resenting my co-workers, sitting on trains, sitting in line at the bank. Now tell me I'm being ridiculous. Doing stuff? Im not - I just sitting!! So the sitting is what comes to mind at first, if you say then, but what about the onsen, or Hiroshima or the bookshop I'll go 'jajajaja...and that!'. So its true (or not true - depending what side you are on), I do do stuff.

But then why do I remember the not-doing, not the doing? Maybe my brain has taken the real experiences further away into my memory - currently unavailable - for extra special preparation before they are filed. They are being fired to be extra strong and durable because they are going to be used a lot in times to come- hauled out for anyone with an unfortunate ten minutes spent with me sitting on a train or in a queue at the bank. They have to be properly preserved. Which means at present I'm left with the dross, and as readers of my blog - so are you; right now we only have the cheap memories which in two weeks time will be tatters.

One thing I am wanting share with ya'll is that I have seen at least a dozen students in Japan with grey hair. Not a hair here and there, all my students have that; no I'm talking a dozen full heads silver. The kids, most often boys, can't be older than sixteen. Amazing hey?

spirited away

2008-10-18T23:11:00.001+09:00

Legend has it that the best cure for a hangover is a bowl of oily salty ramen and a dip in a 40 degree Onsen. Today I tried this out, and found it to be true.

I went with my Japanese language class to Dogo Onsen - one of the oldest Onsen in Japan and, it is said, the inspiration for the hot baths in the animated film Spirited Away. We drove for two hours deep into the isles of Shikoku. The town of Dogo was totally dinky. Old and well maintained, it definitely had a fantasy feel about it. The Onsen building (pic above) is situated at the top of Dogo hondori (a covered shopping arcade). When I first arrived in Japan I went to and wrote about Mihara Onsen but a visit to Dogo confirmed for me that the bright lights and electric zinging of Mihara Onsen is not what these traditional baths are all about. At Dogo, even though it is really famous and steeped in legend, the bath consists of only one relatively small room lined with shower fixtures and little wooden stools along three of the four walls. At its centre is a deep stone pool and at the centre of the pool is a delicate carved stone fountain chugging water. The pool has a lip that you sit in up to your waist. The stone is hot from the water and perfectly smooth and comfortable (decades of bums have worn it perfectly). The one wall that has no showers is dominated by a blue and white tiled mural. The water and the surrounding harmonize beautifully. You really do feel stress and toxins (and beer) just drain out of you into the water and away. I could only tolerate the heat for about ten minutes after which I trotted kaalgat to a shower stall and rinsed myself with ice cold water from a bamboo bucket.

Afterwards I admitted to a Japanese friend that I was craving ice-cream (I felt guilty wanting such a decadent thing after such a cleansing experience). Oh! she said, its very common to want something milky after going to an Onsen and to prove it to me she showed me the vending machines in the lobby - full of milk both plain and flavoured. She had something better in mind though and took us a little further outside the building to a swanky gelato place with crazy flavours. I had a sea salt soft serve. It was utterly delicious and faintly faintly gritty; a creamy electrolyte feast.

The shopping to be had on the hondori was very touristy and Onsen related. The look of the shops, the lighting and bright omiyage (souvenirs) were pitched to perfectly twang your consumer strings so I duly bought some orange jelly and special mochi balls (sweet rice) - both of which are particular to the region.

On the bus coming home I had a full tummy post Onsen nap. Ahhh, heaven.

are we amused?

2008-10-18T21:43:00.000+09:00

I spent the school week doing not much at all. My students were writing exams, I had no classes to teach or papers to mark. I spent the days gently coaxing my ancient work laptop through the internet trying to simultaneously educate myself about the upcoming US election and the history of the Booker Prize. I learnt that even though Obama is a person with personality, once he starts talking economic policy, he's as boring as any other guy and that Booker fans get frighteningly Xenophobic when it comes to Indian winners (Mr Rushdie being the obvious exception). I also fell in love with the new Mac Book and the shiny yellow nano - both of which are on my shopping list - I do like being paid in Yen!

On friday, as an after-exam reward, the students were shipped off to an amusement park and the school kindly allowed me a break from the electioneering and mac perving so onto the bus went I. Amusement parks in Japan, it turns out, are exactly as tacky as amusement parks anywhere else in the world. The same pastiche all faded and rusty. It should look magical but it looks old and depressing. Consequently, all the time you are lying to yourself saying "I feel magical!" No dear, you feel old and depressed. The rides were cool I guess, I crapped my broeks just as I had been hoping - metaphorically of course. The setting of the park was the best thing about it; its in Okayama prefecture, high on a hill surrounded by sea and islands - the breathtaking view I have become so blase about these past couple of months. Seto inland sea? Thousands of islands connected by chugging ferries and bridges glimmering silver in the sun? yawn! I see it like every day!

The park, as some kind of nod to the Brazilian immigrant population of the area, had a mardi gras theme (see creepy guy in header photo - he's the equivalent of the boerish miner outside gold reef city making sure you're tall enough to go on rides). At lunch time everyone in the park made their way to the central arena with their bento or trashy fried foods (theme park food is the same the world over too) for a dancing performance by the parks' mascot - inexplicably its a mouse with an enormous pink head. The mouse danced mournfully to music provided by tinny speakers and a demented shirtless guy on bongos. Then the strangest thing happened - a statuesque Brazilian man came on stage in drag and hosted a bingo game, we had all received bingo score cards along with our entrance tickets. I guess a man in drag is not such a strange thing but his behaviour and how he was received was very strange indeed. He was very pushy and sexually aggressive particularly to the school boys in the audience. Whenever anyone had bingo he would totter towards them in his wedge heels and sit on their laps, flicking his wig in the face and rubbing his fake boobs on them. And everyone loved him! The teachers sitting away from the main area thought it was glorious fun to watch this enormous, muscly man humiliate their charges. I couldn't understand why this raunchy character didnt get up their nose, why he was so unanimously accepted. It felt like someone had hired a drunk prostitute to babysit the neighbourhood kids, and no one batted an eyelid.

I met the performers after the show (they tried to get on the bus and continue torturing kids again, who knows why) and they were all Brazilian nationals, really nice, really genki just trying to do their job. I thought about how I had spent my week at work, feeling mismanaged and spare and out of touch. It didn't seem so bad now, looking at these foreigners who had to wear hot pants and mouse suits in order to get their Japanese work permits. In so many ways Japan is Utopian - things run like clockwork, they think everything down to the last detail and every kind of work and play is structured and available. At some point though you start thinking that someone has to be losing out, all this perfection has got to be at someone's expense.

.

rice picking

2008-10-14T12:36:00.000+09:00

On saturday I went rice picking. The farmer who employed us (I never find out his real name, everyone just called him farmer Bill) was a stylish man in his mid forties; short grey hair, shell toes and tan dungarees over a picasso-like stripey sweater. Farmer Bill has two small paddies ten minutes outside Onomichi city. The setting is ridiulously idyllic: mountains surrounding several dozen small farm holdings, each little road between the plots buffered by wild cosmos and other flowers offsetting the now golden rice fields. Farmer Bill sells his rice for premium price because it is hand planted and hand picked - this barely occurs anymore in Japan. He has been using JET labour for many years. I met a Scotsman there who was Onomichi's first JET, ten years ago. He is now married to the farmer's daughter and works at Onomichi university.

Using JET labour means farmer Bill gets free labour and we get the experience: symbiosis eveyones happy!

There were about ten of us JETS and as many Japanesees - locals from Onomichi town. The work was divided down gender lines: boys doing the scything, girls doing the gathering and tying. Once the field is scythed down and the rice stalks bundled, the boys set up metal tripods all the way down the field upon which are laid long, thick bamboo poles. You take a rice bundle and separate it half half, wedging the gap over a bamboo pole. When we stopped for lunch the field had been tranformed into corridors of hanging rice, rows upon rows much like the how they grew except now they are upside down. The work wasnt over strenuous but it was hard enough to make me realise why the Japanese eat every grain from their plate - rice is precious! When all the cutting, bundling and hanging was done we all went around the fields picking up every stalk of that had been left out - not a single grain was left unharvested! It took twenty of us a day to harvest two the small fields. The yeild farmer Bill told us is about 200kgs of rice, which is nothing: I have almost finished a two kilo bag on my own in under three months. And field only yeilds one crop a year.

Our payment for the day's labour was lunch cooked by the farmer's wife and served picnic style on the road below the fields. We started with a bowl of delicate Miso and veggie soup - white Miso I think (miso comes in white, red and black ranging from delicate to strong in flavour). then there were two enourmous piles of rice, one salty done with red Azuki beans, the other cooked with edamame beans which turned the rice a minty yellow. We ate the rice with boiled carrots from the farm and braaied salmon that we ripped straight from the carcas with our chopsticks. The carrots, we were told come out of the had been carved so each carrot piece was a heart. The salmon had been marinated in a strong sweet dressing and its juices had dripped down onto a bed of onions and aubergine. it was good. it was really good.

For dessert there were persimmons and as a final flourish the farmers wife brought out a three teir poppy seed cake decorated with frilly pink flowers... She sidled up to me (I was off down the lane having a smoke) and asked softly if anyone had had a birthday recently. Yes, I said, as a matter of fact two Jets just had birthdays.

She was pleased. The cake could now be a birthday cake! She pulled five little candles out of her pockets, placing them carefully and asking if I wouldnt mind walking behind and lighting them so we could sing happy birthday. Thats just what I have come to expect from locals I have met. Not only did the lady of the house do something cook a five star meal for ten gallumfing foreigners but then to think that maybe the beautiful tea cake should celebrate them, in all their gallumfing glory.

.

A fish and a Lion King

2008-10-10T22:10:00.000+09:00

Nothing big has happened the last couple of days so I have had nothing much to blog about. I must also admit to an escalating addiction to American shlock TV series - the O.C. I'm in over my head with this one, hours wasted in front of the box. And the video shop just wont quit enabling me! There are still five sparkling unwatched seasons, I cant stop. I want to but I can't.

Still, there are little amazing things, out here, in the world all the time, when I venture out and notice. Like today for the first time I saw the sharks at my local supermarket. Like you would have lobster or fishies in a tank except the tank is a bit bigger and the inhabitants are more belligerent than any fishies or lobster could ever be. Next to the tank are polystyrene pakkies of bits...shark bits. Possibly. Probably.

There is an abandoned lot about about a block from my school and last week it wasnt an abandoned lot anymore but a maze of plastic sheeting and concrete. People are building a house there. The people in question are not construction guys in hard hats and green overalls (all overalls seem to be pistachio round these parts) but a two little old ladies and a little old man. They have the entire building about a foot high already - they tend to it as you would imagine old farmers tending to crops. Slow and peaceful. The fact that they wear those big rice paddy hats only adds to my consternation that they are not growing rice - they're building a house!

The staffroom has moved into quarters at school, the only noticeable difference to my untrained eye being that this new room is carpeted. The change happened overnight. One morning I went to sign the register in the old room and the next day I was directed to register in the new room. The registers were on exactly the same cupboard as before. Every teacher's desk was in the exact same position with the exact same shmattes littered all over - papers, books and toys. The gang of midnight elves that executed the shift must be affiliated with the midnight elves responsible for the overnight transformation of all the vending machines in town. One morning you got cold coffee in a can from the machine, the next, same can, same vending machine: hot coffee. The first time you touch that can it comes as quite a shock...
In the new staff room this evening I checked out, from the corner of my eye, three of my co-workers; one sitting at his desk the other two standing on either side of him, as they watched something play on the seated man's computer screen (I was on the other side of the desks so could not see the screen, only their faces). In unison they laughed uproariously. Their laughter and the new grey carpeting and the fluorescent lights and the shmattes made the scene, just for that second, like a moment from The Office, if someone decided to remake it in Japanese. The standing man on the right roughly adjusted the seat of his pants. It was uncanny and horrifying. I was in The Office but it was in Japanese! I left quickly.

My biggest task this week has been helping a student prepare for a English speaking competition taking place next week. His English is good, and he is smart and expressive but lazy as hell so all the English teachers are very worried. Last year he was also the only pupil at the school to make it to the competition - he did no work and went totally blank when he got up for his recital (in a school hall in front of hundreds of parents, pupils, teachers and three stern judges). So this year the school does not want a repeat. We are doing everything we can to make this kid learn his speech. I'm pretending to know what I'm doing because I should right? With drama experience learning words and so on. Yesterday we were scheduled to meet for an hour or two after his exams - the poor kid is overworked!! He was and hour late for our appointment. When he turned up Kikawa-sensei the teacher in charge, a dear and mild mannered woman, let rip at him for at least ten minutes in rapid fire Japanese. She then sent him away - to bring his friend I discovered - who also got shat on from a dizzy height. The speech kid then sidled up to my desk and said mournfully and in broken English. 'Jemma-san. I am sorry. I lied to you. I said I would come and I didn't. I told you it was because I had to study but instead I went shopping with my friend. We had lunch. I am sorry.' My heart broke. Of course he bunked my lesson! I would have bunked my lesson. The sweet mannered teacher, who is to date the only person I have heard shouting in this country then coaxed Keisuke (thats the kids name) to get out his speech and we could start working. Out of his enormous bag he pulled a dripping, disintegrating piece of paper. His speech was in tatters. 'What happened?' she asked in English for my benefit, and not unkindly (for my benefit too?). 'My tea broke.' said Keisuke miserably.

There was no more shouting, his punishment and repentance done with, Kikawa-sensei helped him clean out his sopping bag and printed him a new speech. She chatted with him like his sister or his mom; teasing him gently about how lazy he was, how scatty. In Japan, if a school kid gets in a car accident or something the authourities will phone the kid's class teacher before they phone their parents. Thats the level of intimacy teachers and students have. Its remarkable and makes for a very respectful environment, hence the humble heartbreaking apology.

If we had just one more week to work on this speech I reckon Keisuke could crack it. He's doing an abridged story of The Lion King and he knows the movie backwards, he does the voices masterfully. His English is in fact, not as good as I thought, the words he is saying he often doesnt understand at all but he has a superbly fine tuned ear for phonetics and that, paired with his acting ability would, with just one more week - make one killer speech. But the contest is next Sunday. And he has a class trip to Hokkaido all of next week. Kikawa-sensei says he must must practice but come on! He aint gonna do nothing! I know because in his situation I would do nothing! Poor Keisuke!

radiohead

2008-10-02T22:52:00.001+09:00

Radiohead in Osaka. Got a nice ring to it I think. I hurtled away from school and two thirty, was in Osaka by five. Was watching the band by eight and home in bed just after midnight. What kind of world is this that I can zoom through such an important experience? I kept saying to myself: take it in! take it in dammit! but there was so much. it was too hard.

If I have asked Toby really nicely and he has said yes, there will be a photo of the concert at the top of the blog? Is there one? I hope so.

The venue was like being in an almond shaped crystal with a thin layer of icing over it. got it? ok good. It probably could hold 10 000 people but was only holding I'd say, maybe 5 000. I was waaaay at the back of the standing section and we all know what that means for a shtoempic, a shorty. No view of nothing never. Ah no! And it is a fallacy that Japanese people are short. Maybe you get less 6ft monsters per capita but everyone is sill taller than me (that is to say they are all over 5ft). So its not like I could see any better here, than a concert somewhere else in the world. Not being able to see doesnt help when you are trying madly to take it all in, drink it all up. But fears of missing the biggest thing to happen to the littlest Jemma were assuaged; I did find a pretty descent angle of visibilty, at the expense of physical comfort, of course. and then the lights went out and the opening band (called i-dont-know-who-they-are-and-

im-sure-they-are-very-nice-but-be-a-sport-and-
piss-off-now) came and went and then then radiohead came on.

There were four different kinds of lights on stage and all of them had so totally transcended the toggle ability of lights, I kinda feel I am insulting them by just calling them lights, such a small word. - first off at the lintel of the stage was a plantation of millions of little lights that could become any colour under the sun - it was the sun! only better coz it could change colours and do things clouds can do as well. Then, hanging down from the roof, running from stage front to back were long dangly tube lights of different lengths that made it look like the band was deep inside a church organ. perched high above, all over the stage were grapefruit bunches of lights. running the length of the back wall was a low bank of fiber optics, i think thats what they were. they were used for general scratchiness, the Kubrick effect. bzzt bzzt, fear, nervousness. that kind of thing. All the lights were synchronised and each song had had a light show delicately crafted to peak and troug
h with the music, utterly transforming the stage. At times it looked like green toxic ooze was bubbling up from thr floor and bleeding over the crowd. At times it looked like they were in a hyperspeed blossom storm. Other times it looked as if the band was in a bleached and blown out victorian photograph - but moving, sometimes it even looked like a rock concert. Above the Kubrick lights on the back wall were three utterly enourmous screens that were used mostly to give video feed of bits of the artists. Thom's head, drummer's foot, Greenwood's fingers etc. The clarity of the images was breathtaking, they could also be twiddled to become monochromatic, blown-out, polarised or whatever. Insta sexy MTV. They crescendo-ed during paranoid android when suddenly everything went psychedelic green pink orange - explosions and seizures of light and screaming jerking close-ups.

From the description above you might imagine the concert was pretty wild, but the funny thing is, it wasnt at all. The reasons for this are multiple. Firstly, it was Radiohead in Japan and Japanese people dont go mental; they might wiggle their bums a bit but thats it. Not that they are bored, just quiet appreciaters I think. Secondly, due to my position in the arena (my carefully chosen spot for maximum visibility), I spent the night leaning perilously over a railing to my right. Imagine being in an aeroplane isle seat, straining sideways to see if the loo is available. Yeah, that was my posture for three hours (but standing). If i rested my head on my hand it was actually quite comfortable but it did mean my bum wiggling, even my clapping and hollering were extremely limited. So a calm crowd and a calm me. Then Radiohead themselves who are chilled out, but happy. Happy you say? Surely no! But Indeed yes! I think I was expecting to see Thom Yorke wheeled out in a chair, twitching a
nd crying but he seems pretty happy, pretty normal. He likes to dance, well twiddle about and laugh and stuff. Just like a real person. Their set wasn't so much sad as dreamy (the other worldly lights and sleeping head angle of mine being contributors). Whenever I did lift my head upright it felt like I was waking up - that sense of where am I? Who are these people? Whats going on? But in a good way. I had it really strongly once when Thom Yorke finsished or started some song with a friendly 'hello. heehee.' it sounded so familiar - like an old boyfriend saying 'hello' just as you wake up coz he was watching you sleep.

The music was awesome　- in Japanese SUGOI, MONOSUGOI - すごい，ものすごい．
Just amazing. Imagine what you would want Radiohead to sound like. They sound like that. But with unexpected details that make you say wow. wowee.

Because I only know their old stuff, two thirds of the set was just pretty new noise to me (I had to abstain from post concert conversations - 'what was your favourite', 'what was yours' - because I would have said 'ooh! the pink song and the one where the lights went white in the middle' and disgraced myself in front of the die hards). The stuff I did know was orgasmic - seriously: paranoid android, exit music for a film, the bends, idioteque, everything in its right place, airbag and my personal ultimate bestest - climbing up the walls. For exit music for a film there was just a smoky white spot on Thom Yorke. You could have heard a pin drop. And in terms of stamina? Prowess? Tightness? Talent? Aw man, anything I have seen hithertofor (eh?) is just wiped off the map. That man can sing, but fuckoff!! sing. and the instruments are so so tight and everyone plays like seven of them. You can hear they have been together for ages but they still love doing it.

And then it was over and we streamed outdoors and 3 000 of the 5 000 crowd veered right to the demarcated smoking section (there had been no smoking or drinking permitted inside). And before I knew it I was being shooed into a taxi and then dragged through a train station by boys at breakneck speed to make the last Shinkansen home. And then we were on the train staring at eachother in exhausted, elated disbelief. And then I was home.

Weekend of Wonder

2008-09-28T15:50:00.000+09:00

Last week I was starting to feel down about being in Japan. I miss home. The monotony of my job borders on morbid. My town is, honestly speaking, an armpit (close to nice places but smelly in and of itself). Jenkin-san had given me the advice 'Stay active, stay happy!' and you know what, that was my problem indeed. Of course I was miserable in my tiny flat watching dvds and feeling lonely and wretched. The job is boring yes, but in my own time, dammit, i gots to do things rather than lamenting. So, from a much happier Jem in Japan, the next two posts are a run-down of my weekend which saved me from getting onto SAA and coming thefuck home. A weekend of new things that are so new I never knew they were there. Look at photos on flickr.com

Enjoy.

Gondry's Japan

2008-09-28T15:25:00.000+09:00

At a moment's notice on Saturday I headed out into the mountains to a tiny music festival hosted by various artists, musicians and other cool people from Onomichi - my favourite dinky town ten minutes from Mihara. It was tiny, maybe 150 people in total and, without being too effusive, I have to say it was the best thing I have done in Japan thus far! The setting was too beautiful to be true - a tiny clean campsite surrounded by pines and mountains with a steep slope on one side leading to a deep grey damn. The weather has finally let up and the days were crisp, the night pleasantly chilly. There wasn't a stage so to speak, in the middle of the clearing stood one lone pine tree under which was a wooden bench for musicians (which at night, like everything in this country) was lit spectacularly. It seems everyone who attended brought their own stall or display or toy and everything was free and available at all hours. Under a clump of trees someone had brought two fat white goats who lazed about and made children hysterical with delight and terror. A small wooden desk next to the goat had a notepad and pencil. You would write a letter (private wishes and secrets) and hang it from the trees from coloured string and at the end of the festival the letters were lowered and fed to the goats, your secrets excreted as tiny turds all over the field. A particularly ingenious addition to the festival was a blimp size white balloon made from hundreds of garbage bags and inflated by a fan. Inside the floor was covered with patchwork quilts, the light was clean and surreal. It was like being in a whale in a particularly friendly picturebook. At night the blimp was illuminated with projections from the outside of fireworks, water and trees. You could just sit for hours watching the colours leak all over, every now and again sharp shadows of men with guitars walking around you. There were rainbow hammocks (that were again there, it seems, to delight and terrify children), stalls selling chai and tom yum and curry. There was an enourmous cardboard house lit with dangling bulbs that you could walk inside and decorate with paints and crayons.

If this all sounds psychedelic its because it was! I kept thinking to myself, where are the drugs? people do this without drugs? indeed! they do! which means it had the magic of a hippie festival but none of the filth and none of the sordidness. It was truly truly magical. I'll post the photos on flickr soon and you can see for yourself.

The highlight of the performances was a man in dungarees who did a one-man-band guitar n harmonica puppet show. I didnt understand what he was saying but he was very fervent which made it very funny. I especially liked the two photo cardboard cut out puppets which were mini replicas of himself (big sunglasses, floral hat) with which he did a short but slick dance routine.

Everyone at the festival was so kind and chilled out. Ah! I thought, this is where the cool people in Japan are, the ones who arent teachers and salarymen (who until now, were the only people I had encountered). The food was delicious, the music was gentle and sweet, the stalls really did make you feel like a five year old (except maybe you werent scared of goats). It was like living in the movie Science of Sleep. Utterly surreal. Utterly magical. The best place in the whole world. I almost feel like I shouldnt be writing about it, like it doesnt actually exist, it was just a dream made of plastercine in a forest with a snow white goat.

the elders

2008-09-28T14:53:00.000+09:00

There is a group of old politicos called The Elders who I only found out about recently. Its Madiba, Tutu, Jimmy Carter, some Scandewegian, the Ex Irish lady president, a whole bunch.　Because they are old and respected and not technically part of any government they can take a stand against big wold issues and speak their minds freely without recourse. Pretty cool. Well this weekend I hate a date with what felt like Mihara's answer to The Elders.

On friday afternoon, Gunch asked me if I woudlnt mind our daily lesson being a field trip today, after work. I said that sounded most excellent. At five o clock I met him in town and together we walked the short distance to his old friend Machan's okonomikayi shop. The shop is called Sachan, after his wife. It is a tiny eatery consisting of a long hotplate surrounded by stools. There is a wall of manga on one wall for patrons with no one to talk to I suppose, although in this place everyone knows everyone and conversation swings around the little place so rapidly I cannot imagine anyone having a moment, or the inclination to read. There is also a grotty seventies TV mounted in the corner. As it is sumo season, sumo was playing when we entered and it provided mild distraction and a conversation piece to the patrons.

Okonomiyaki, incase I havent explained previously, is a Hiroshima prefecture speciality. Batter is poured onto the huge iron hotplate and gently moulded into a paper thin crepe. on top is piled a mountain of cabbage, noodles, fish, meat and veggies. Once these have simmered down an egg is broken on top to form an omlette covering. Its doused in sauce, decorated with ginger, you are armed with a spatular and it used pushed toward you with a giant spatula. Voila. Dinner. The okonomiyaki Gunch and I shared had cuttlefish and strips of pork. It was delicious.

Gunch is 67. Machan and his wife are also 67 and they have all been friends for 50 years. Everyone else who came into the shop was introduced to me as being an old friend of Gunch's too and they all, it turns out were 67 with the exception of a tiny little old man who looked like a bean with enourmous spectacles who didnt like the fact thatI ate left handed. This bean could have been 95. He wore bright blue plaid golf pants. 67 year old no 4 wore a battered straw hat that made him look like he should be in the Caribbean. Machan had a pale yellow polo shirt and the beginnings of a Tom Sellek moustache.

Initially I did what has become my routine introductory performance. Lots of smiling, yes, I am from Africa! It is far, seventeen hours on a plane. Machan was particularly interested in South African currency and how long it took my to save the money to get to Japan and how much beer was in South Africa etc. Straw hat knew a lo0t about South Africa: Kimberly, the Cullinan diamond and Gary Player. But soon enough Gunch put an end to the prattle and settled down to our lesson which he scratched out on folded up flyers and bits of napkin (which I now have stored in a box of my most precious possessions). He explained to me that although you get okomiyaki all over Japan, the people of Hiroshima have a special attachment to it and he asked why I thought this was the case. 'Because!', he said (before I could answer), after the devastation of the war, and the bomb, people in Hiroshima had nothing to cook with, and nothing to eat with. Everything was destroyed. With no pots, no pans, no nothing they took to okonomiyaki because it requires no utensils at all and can be compiled out of anything - an egg, a scrap of fish, a bit of flour. He told me about his experience of the war; how his father (92 and going strong!) had not joined the army because he was a railway man; a valuable and necessary profession during the war. They had suffered massively from food shortages, everything that could be eaten was sent to the army. People had barely anything. I have just finished reading a manga by a man named Nakazawa called 'Barefoot Gen' about living in Hiroshima during the bomb and when I mentioned this Gunch nodded furiously. Yes, yes, he was just like Barefoot Gen! Ah! says a man with long orange hair and fingernails sittng at the other end of the shop, Barefoot Gen, yes! He read it in high school. This is how the evening progressed with people all over the tiny shop putting in their two cents worth and laughing while Machan furiously produced okonomiyaki and his wife poured beer.

I enjoyed myself most when my presence was forgotten and I could watch all the people just talking amongst themselves in rapid fire Japanese. I think they spoke for some time about a Russian competitor in the Sumo tournament. Gunch told me too about the throwing of salt I had witnessed at sports day that is an integral part of Sumo - it cleanses the arena and is a most ancient and respected tradition. Yes, its true the Bean concurred.

When we left Machan and his wife greeted me so warmly! Gunch told me that Machan had said I was welcome to come without Gunch as often as I could. I think I have a fan!

sports day

2008-09-23T21:03:00.000+09:00

For the last two weeks the students and teachers have been abuzz about sports day - making posters, rehearsing all kinds of dancing, cleaning the school. Last saturday the day finally arrived, the typhoon had passed, and sports was on!

The field (which is just sand really: an athletics track cum baseball pitch) was surrounded by tenting for the crowd (parents, teachers and honourable board members). At one end the tents gave way to a make-shift archway, decked in paper flowers where students would come through for races and events. the sports coach stood at the gate with a clipboard making sure everything was in order and throwing a handful of salt after each set of participants passed through. I have heard of salt throwing before. It is apparently a big part of Sumo ritual too but of its exact significance im not sure.

Events began with speeches from the principal, en masse radio exercises (kind of like a warmup done to music that is done country wide to a radio broadcast) and much bowing. It was blisteringly hot, I was so thankful to be in the shade of the first aid tent (where my seat had been placed) but the students standing in neat rows in the middle of the pitch doing exercises didnt wilt at all. They were precise as soldiers.

The events were a combination of your usual relays, hurdles and hundred meters and then more inventive and downright peculiar displays. I say the regular relays, nonthing was regular in fact because at the start of every race, with the pistol, music would start, like chariots of fire but played on a casio keyboard and ten times faster. at first I couldnt stop giggling, it was just so silly but I must admit, by the end I quite enjoyed the exitement it added to each event. The more peculiar events included a jump rope competition where an entire class of twenty five would stand in line and try to simultaneously jump a very very long rope being weilded on either side by, what I imagine were the longest limbed in the class. There were also obstacle courses which included bicycle wheels under nets, four legged races, crawling and sacks, all rather treacherous - and seemingly more tracherous due to the danger music. At my school, which like most in Japan is co-ed, the pupils, I think from shyness, kind of naturally divide by gender. In class they never sit together, talk to eachother or work in intergender pairs. At sports day however, some of the events forced mixing (like the four legged race where a gangly boy is tied to a little girl on either side of him and forced to hold on for dear life). There seemed to be a natural joy and relief in all of them, to finally be able to play with those other people that they see all day, every day but never have any interaction with.

My favourite favourite race was one where students had to run 50m to a baseball bat, lean over and balance their forhead on the unturned bat and spin around ten times. they then had to run another 50m to the finishline but were so gaga that they ran into eachother, fell down or went screaming into the side netting. It was bloody hilarious, like watching drunk babies. Another favourite was a bizarre team event where one boy had to be dressed in drag in two minutes flat by four tittering girls, then the boys got together and did an elaborate and extremely well rehearsed back street boys dance routine complete with the splits and breakdancing...Old boys rugby at Parktown is certainly was not!

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new photos

2008-09-23T01:37:00.000+09:00

hi lovely friends and relations

finally added new photos to flickr. they are of my school sports day, miyajima, and things that i eat.

look at them here!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/meinmihara

marking

2008-09-19T16:08:00.000+09:00

Im doing some marking at the moment at school. Im always doing marking actually but this particular marking made me realise something...

The students, who are generally on the ball, do not understand the exercise I am currently marking. Usually the bell curve is fully functional when it comes to the ability and results of the kids - a suprising number of them 'got' the kristov kyslofsky comprehension, some not so much. anyway, with this particualr exercise they're all just bombing out. doesnt make a word of sense to them and therefore, their answers make buggerall sense to me.

so I am not so much marking, as filling in their answer sheets over and over again with the correct answers. writing the same lines over and over again. Writing lines! I am writing lines!

why? what did i do wrong?

Miyajima

2008-09-19T09:27:00.000+09:00

The lack of posts is not indicative of me doing so much that I have no time to write, nor of me doing so little there is nothing to write about. Last weekend I spent in Hiroshima city again with Agnes and Jamie, South African friends. Talking to them about nothing in particular - using slang from home, comparing our lives here and speculating...nay gossiping about people at home - all this was immensely gratifying, like a hot stone massage, deeply good for you. We went to Miyajima - the island known for its enourmous red shrine gate or Torii, you'll know it when you see it. Its touted as one of the top three sites in Japan, and man, they arent kidding. THe island seems to have magic in it. I couldnt describe it better than imagine disneyland if it was real and 600 years old. deep old magic. but lighthearted. a pretty rubbish description, sorry. The Torii are this fantastic matte orange. We went at low tide (they are built in the sea) so we could walk right up to them and get that worms eye view of their enourmousness. There is also a breaktaking Pagoda on the island - that same fierce orange colour that, combined with white looks extremely modern, hard to believe they are over 500 years old. I realised that these were probably the oldest buildings I have ever seen, making them some of the oldest man made things I have ever seen. The highlight of the island for me though was an unfinished temple on a hill (arrived at by a pretty painful stone stairway). It was a deeply calm place, all a made of wood worn smooth from 100s of years of socked feet. Like with Shukkein garden what I liked so about this temple was how people used the space. People were quiet in the temple but it did not feel as if the building imposed the silence on you - like you were walking on eggshells. Instead, the architecture, textures and light had such a soothing effect on one that silence was welcome and natural. I wish I could describe it better than that! I have hesitated to write about Miyajima because any explanation or description just cannot achieve any sense of the place. Please come and visit me and I will take you there so you can see it for yourself.

Oh! to add to the magic, there are bambies everywhere. those little deer with spots on their arse. Tame as anyhting. There are even signs up saying they'll eat your camera case if you arent careful...

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hair, poems and takkies

2008-09-09T15:22:00.000+09:00

i am nearly finished marking all the stuff teachers keep sneaking onto my desk to mark. im actually coming to enjoy marking. the precision of it. i am becoming quite frighteningly precise here. like at night when i lay out my futon and place the air-con remote, my cell phone and a glass of water just so next to my bed. every night. in the same order. and i have started to get to work within three minutes of eight fifteen. and im only due there at eight forty five. weird! but i like it. the new jemma 08. cleaner, more reliable. like bio-fuel.

the student essays im marking, although very basic, are remarkably thoughtful. the topic is 'the moment that changed me the most' and these 16 year old kids are talking about the moment they realised that feeling love isnt the most important thing, one must express it. Or that their parents shout and scold because they love them or that they understand why they are scared of a ringing phone because when they picked up the phone aged ten they heard that their grandfather was dead. Can you imagine my parktown yobs, charming as they are, writing this stuff? theres no machismo in this society. that paired with a built-in contemplativness (the thing which makes internet installation or a trip to the post office so bloody endless) results in these thoughtful self effacing little tykes! and you wouldnt expect it if you saw them. the boys all have long manicured fingernails and big big hair. and baggy pants and the perfect contreposto slouch. the girls have extremely asymmetrical hair that falls in shards over their eyes and all their possesions are covered in shiny pink stickers and both sexes wear cutting edge super kief takkies. purple and neon green nike high tops. black shell toes electro pixel decor. retro puma. the schools here dont regulate hair and shoes as part of uniform. In that Peter Carey I read, Wrong About Japan - he says that yes, Japan is a conformist society but it is also a Visualist society. They develop (or indeed inheret from the west) an aesthetic and then meticulously reproduce it - it is this conformist-cum-visualist tendency that resulted in calligraphy. its also what makes 50 school boys have enourmous, meticulous and identical hair.

gunch today explained to me the haiku. i thought i already knew about haikus but, as always i realised i knew absolutely vokkol. What i always tried to do with a haiku is understand it as a narrative, in time, but it is like a painting, a moment that stretches infinitely only because you can study its momentary-ness in such detail. i think the problem of wanting there to be narrative came from the western tendency to write the poem on three lines. the japanese write only one line (left to right or top to bottom). the haiku itself is picturesque. also, because of the japanese grammatical structure, the thing at the end of the poem might be the subject. when i remembered this, it blew the haiku wide open. they dont have beginnings middles and ends any more than a portrait.

the homogenous

2008-09-07T15:52:00.000+09:00

My friday lesson with Gunch consisted of learning the kanji for homogenous and heterogenous. We discussed the benefits of each type of society and the drawbacks. He asked me about South Africa's Unity in Diversity motto and, it was only whilst discussing it with him thatI realised that it was a kind of synonym for integration. Whereas Apartheid was a synonym for segregation. A very obvious parallel perhaps, but I had to be three billion miles away with a 75 year old Japanese man to see it!

The following day, Saturday, I went to Onomichi - a town 10 minutes from Mihara. They are probably about the same size but whereas Mihara is industrial and ugly Onomichi is quaint and arty. I think I have fallen in love with it. There is a wide patch of lawn wedged between Onomichi station and the sea (with regulation breathtaking island view) where you can sit and drink beer (public drinking widely accepted in this wonderful country) and watch the otherworldly go by. The town is also littered with cool little clothes and tsastke (sp?) shops. I bought whati thought was a very rakish Annie Hall type hat which, upon return to Mihara looks a little little silly. I also went to an icecream parlour with friends. While we waited for seating at one of the small wooden tables - need I add they all had a sea view - we noticed something peculiar: all the steel icecream tubs on display had white icecream inside. were the different flavours invisible? Upon odering it turns out thatthe icecream parlour sells only vanilla icecream. the variety comes with whether you have it in a cup or a cone.

heehee
/

the waving cat

2008-09-04T14:49:00.000+09:00

you know those golden ceramic or plastic cats you see at the entrance to every chinese resturaunt and yo sushi? those are maneki-neko. They are welcome cats (maneku is to beckon) and their job is to beckon customers from the street. The waving arm isnt actually waving you see. Its beckoning and this leads into the culutral difference lesson that I had today with Gunch, my new friend.

Whereas we Western folk beckon to someone with a gesture that is a palm up finger flick - imagine how you gesture 'come here', the Japanese do it palm down. Their palm down finger flick beckon looks very similar to our palms down finger flick voetsek so initially being called to by a Japanese person is very confusing (it happened to me on my hospital trip). this is the most notable gesture divergence i have come across yet (aside from the gesture for 'I' or 'me?' which for us is pointing to the chest and for the Japanese, a point to the nose).

So anywho, Gunch told me that when Maneki Neku manufacturers realised that their cats were popular tourist trinkets and that Westeners had a different directional beckon they began to produce cats that gestured the other way, the Western way. So apparently, if i look hard enough I'll be able to find Maneki-Neko that dont gesture down in a 'wave' beckon, but up: the Western way - as if throwing salt over its little golden shoulder.

(Todays blog is dedicated to Smashley - for his endless fascination with Maneki Neku).

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Hiroshima Weekend

2008-09-03T14:57:00.001+09:00

This weekend I felt like a mini-adventure. Nothing that would result in cuts and bruises; just a little foray into a new place (that is safely only an hour and a half from home). Thus I ended up in Hiroshima city - not for the first time. But it was was the first time by myself. It feels like ages since I have been utterly by myself. Strange, since I am in a country where I dont know anybody. The truth is that the people I do know I see a lot and I could feel my personality slipping into the liminal space between being my personality and their personality. Blahblahblah off I went and in Hiroshima I found the aloneness I needed among 1 million people.　The following three posts (HW) can be read chronologically top to bottom.

HW pt1: Art museum

2008-09-03T14:55:00.000+09:00

My first destination in the city was the Prefectural Museum of Art. The building reminded me of the Whitney. Seventies grey brick with very clean corners. I liked it. Inside was that blessed hush combined with sub-zero air conditioning - that special art gallery feeling. I could pay 600 Yen for a normal ticket or 900 Yen for normal entry plus a special exhibition or 1200 Yen for the gallery, the special exhibit and the entry into the traditional Japanese garden next to the gallery. I could see some of the garden through the huge windows - a neat green square with leaves romantically scattered about, along the farthest side ran a collonade of vines under which were weather beaten adarondak chairs. Temptation enough! I took the really pricey ticket.

I spent and hour or two in the gallery's permanent collection. It is small but very well chosen and curated. You enter into a mini-sculpture hall. At the far end is a huge mother and child that looks like its made of gold but really thin gold with a light bulb inside because it glows. It is in fact the original plaster cast of a bronze but its lit so beautifully as to look like the light is internal. The sculpture was made shortly after the A bomb and shows a Pieta-like duo but instead of Mary's knowing calm, the mother is distressed, the weight of her dead child wrenching her arms down and pulling her back. I would say close to 60% of Japanese art I saw this weekend had a connection with the war or the bomb. It was quite harrowing and meant that when it came time to visit the A bomb museum itself, I just couldnt do it.

After the sculpture garden you find yourself in the European art room. As you enter Dali's enourmous Dream of Venus lurches at you. It is fucking wonderful. It is not his most famous drippy clock painting but it is a drippy clock painting and it is huge and when I finally let it have me I got lost in the landscape and the dali turquoise sky and the satisfying illusion of the drippy clocks for ages.
The other highlight of the room was an Arp sculpture called Birth or something equally non-descript. If you walked round and round the small bronze it seemed to morph and bubble becomeing a fish and then a bird and then a fish again. It was also perfectly lit. The lighting in the whole place so well done.

The second room of the permanent collection was Japanese art from the same period as the art in the European room (1915-1960) : war years. Apart from the work that was clearly influenced by the Bomb, I found it hard to distinguish Japanese-ness in the paitnings. They all looked like Miro or Picasso or German Expressionist knock offs. Which gots me to thinking: we allow our Western art to have Japanese influence (Van Gogh and his crew) or African influence (Picasso and his posse) but when the influence runs the other way, suddenly they become knock offs. Must all Japanese art look like wood block prints? To answer my question the next room housed a contemporary work by a Japanese artist consisting of ten or so kimonos suspended behind glass lit with surgical white light. I loved them. They were Japanese but they weren't wood block prints (which dont get me wrong, are really beautiful). I dont know what I was supposed to admire in the Kimonos: the cloth, the slight surreal oversized-ness, the craft of them. I ended up admiring the cloth which ranged from muted Japanese tartan (such a thing exists) to crazy Op Art blocks in neon pink and grey.

All this thinking and looking had made me very hungry so I treated myself to a posh lunch in the gallery resturaunt. Fish, pickles, rice, salad and accoutrements. plus coffee. I was the youngest person in the place by at least 30 years. Imagine upper east side matriarchs in pearls but make them Japanese - those were my fellow diners. Still, unlike the upper east side, I was treated politely, generously and kindlylee - I have yet to encounter anything but in this country.

The views of the garden were enticing me and even though I had a special exhibition calling me from the third floor, I reasoned, what if it rains later in the afternoon? Just a quick garden turn-around after lunch then I would give the special exhibition my full attention. The garden was just too much to ignore.

HW pt 2: the garden

2008-09-03T14:53:00.000+09:00

Japanese gardens are an art form. The paths are created to provide a walker with a wide range of views and contrasts - shade looking into light; light looking into shade. across the water looking at the water from the stones etcetc. There are also seats carefully situated to provide a sitter with the ultimate vista, heavy on the composition. Shukkein Garden in Hiroshima did all this. Although it is in the city centre, two minutes into the garden and you cannot hear or see the city in the slightest. The hobbity paths take you around and through the big central lake. There are old wooden boats moored here and there (I thought initially just for decoration but I reaslised the gardeners must use them to go into the lake and prune tend the little islands). One feels immediately at ease in the garden. It is the beauty but also the way people use it: they are relaxed. Little old ladies were sleeping on benches. Teenagers in enourmous clothes with rhinestones walk around chatting. Dads with cigarettes hanging out their mouths help their kids spot terrapins - of which there are many! I liked that it was ot an exclusive space, it is an utterly public one but, and here's the wacky part, these teenagers and dads with cigarettes are so respectful of the place that they wouldnt dare be boisterous or drop ash on the floor. An example of where letting your hair down and trashing the place are not synonymous. I always thought they were. I spent about an two hours in the garden: walking, spying on people and looking at views whilst quietly contemplating my cultural inferiority. when I had finished in the gallery I went back to the garden and ate an ice cream and read The Great Gatsby. It was a beautiful afternoon.

completely ruined me for the special exhibit.

HW pt 3: special exhibit

2008-09-03T08:47:00.000+09:00

The Special Exhibit was a Le Corbusier extravaganza with not only building sketches and blue prints and photos but models and drawings and paintings by him too - who knew he painted? he was actually quite a good painter and a very good sculptor. The room filled with his fine arts was also filled with ultra hip hiroshima fashion types so I was too intimidated to go really close and examine the work. from afar it looked great. Analytical Cubism at its humourous best. What really did it for me was the models. Oh architectural models!! why are they so beautiful? these ones (again) were lit to perfection; the absolute best one being a cross section of an apartment in Unite de Habitation with a light box on the one side that mimicked the sun so you could see how light would fall in the kitchen or the bedroom at different times of day.

There was a dvd of the construction of some of his most famous stuff but it was in Austrian or German or something. All the hip Hiroshima people watched it diligently. Even though I could have more successfully pretended to understand what was being said, by that time I was tired and I wanted to buy things to renew my spirits. The gift shop was oddly stocked...and I could only afford post cards anyway.

the day to day

2008-08-27T08:31:00.000+09:00

I have started teaching so finally it feels like i can establish some kind of routine. this is what my working weeek is like:

I wake up and roll up my futon (you cant leave a futon on tatami because it will go all mouldy). Japan, I was suprised to discover, has really good bread - thick sliced and yeasty. They have also developed excellent toasters as a compliment. So i make toast and have it with strawberry jam (thick and natural tasting) accompanied by an iced coffee - `Virginia`s Finest` that I can buy from the vending machine across the road. Then I hops onto my bicycle at 7:56 and I rides to school. It is not easy riding to school in a pencil skirt (a pencil skirt indeed! its the new me) - a constant negotiation between balance and decency. Along the way I see my students on their bikes - soemthing about the angle of handle bar to bike seat gives everyone on bikes here an extremely relaxed appearance, its realy cool. everyone also rides extremely slowly.

then i get to school and check my email. i dont feel too guilty about this coz i arrive early and check mail in what is technically off-the-clock time. everyone in the teacher's room looks extremely busy ( totemo isogashii), even when they are sleeping at their desks. remarkable!

I teach between 2 and three classes a day (which i will describe in detail another time) and for the rest of the time I am at my desk marking, doing lesson prep and making surfing wikipedia look very important and absorbing - which it is. I read about Ghandi for like an hour the other day. There was a lot i didnt know about Ghandi! Every now and again Shintani-sensei will come to my desk for an impromtu Japanese lesson. He prefers to be called Gunch, his nickname since creche. It means 'as insolent as a rock' and he is extremely proud of it. He is the only teacher who has the gumption to leave at the bell at end of the day - all other teachers stay at least two hours into the evening. My lesson with Gunch yesterday was a Japanese/Astronomy lesson. I learnt how to say Southern Cross and Polar Star, he told me where the latter was situated in the sky; and I also learnt to say 'I have seen the Southern Cross,but never the Polar star. Gunch-san, have you seen the Southern Cross?`

When school is done I cruise around the city on my bike. Because my fridge is so small I buy groceries daily - it gives me endless pleasure. At first I was frequenting a supermarket that was so big it was scary. Then I found one closer to my house. But it so small it was scary! Then I found one over a hill and around a dale which was just right! Every evening I go there and buy something to drink (juice is really good in Japan) and some kind of desert - bitter chocolate or an enourmous pink peach - the size of a small melon.

For dinner I have miso soup - Im learning to make it pretty good! And then my peach! Then i go onto the balcony and look at the mountains or read a bit.

Its a little life isnt it? Not too little to be scary though...just right!

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2008-08-24T15:52:00.000+09:00

the ferry to Okunojima

The Japanese do campin right! A big group of us (gaijin and nohonjin - foreign and japanese) headed out yesterday morning to Okunojima - an island about 15 minutes from Mihara.

The island is now a peaceful resort, it looks like Jurassic Park - very lush; with views of Inland islands. It used to be a secret island - not on maps or anything - where the Japanese made poisonous gas from the early 20th century until the end of WWII. Now there is a museum and monuments that commenmorate all the workers and rabbits who died or were affected by the production of mustard gas. The rabbits were set free after the factory was closed and now roam free on the island. There are thousdands of them sleeping and frolicking along the paths, in the shrines and all around the campsites. Bunnies more than any other animal I think, need adverbs. The do not sit - they flop. The do not run but lollop about. They are very tame and will quitely sidle up to you, noses twitching and eat straight from you hand. The ones by the campsites are fat and velvety. The ones up in the hills are a little more rugged so I made a point of feeding them lots.

The island is covered in wooden walk paths that lead you up to the very top of the hills and all around the coastline. The views are stunning, the inland sea is a milky teal colour and perfectly warm. I spent happy hours reading The Great Gatsby on the mossy ground surrounding the island temple and also on the beach - a tiny patch of sand which i had to share with hoards of frolicking kids. We went for a swim at night and the ocean was teeming with phosperesence (sp?). I felt like a Harry Potter character, cutting silver lines in the black water with the silouettes of mountauns all around.

The campsite, like everything in the country, is clean and super organised. We set up our tents in a straight stripe looking out over the sea. I was aware that as a South African, used to tonnes and tonnes of braai meat, I may be a little dissapointed by a Japanese BBQ, but no! I was well impressed. For meat we had tender little medallions of beef that came off the braai super tender. Instead of marinading they went onto the fire flavourless and we then dipped them into a variety of deeply delicious sauces. After the meat came yakisoba - onions and cabbage fried down to sweet strings that are then added to noodles and fried again. We had this for dinner in the leftover meat juices on our plates and then again for breakfast on thick slices of white bread, with scrambled eggs and mayonnaise. So good!

One feels a great triumph swimming in a new sea. The inland sea was no dissapointment. I kept having to remind myself to take it all in - the view of mountains and islands, the little fishing boats buzzing lazily along and big tankers going about their business in the distance. I got horribly sun-burned (sorry mom) - thats what you get for falling asleep on the beach. It was well worth it.

I will definitely go back to Oukonojima in the autumn and spring to watch the bunnies go about their business under the colourful trees. For more pics of bunny island check my flickr account.

What fun I did have. The weekend made me want to buy a tent and a camping chair and do the whole of Asia from campsite to campsite. Coming home to Mihara I felt that sense of achievement one feels after camping - i did it! Also the feeling of fantasy, that not an hour before you were in a wrold without buildings or trains, just watching the sea go in and out on an island where bunnies rule supreme.

starting to miss you

2008-08-20T21:11:00.000+09:00

one of the many layers of feelings that is surfacing quite often at the moment is the missing. I am missing my friends and family. I think it is because over time you develop such an eloquent language with the people you are close to and its hard being unable to speak it now. to communicate the things i see and do with the ease that that language allows. I want you to see things with me and share everything i do with all of you! the friends i have here are vital indeed but they are new and i cannot really e x p e r i e n c e with them. not like i can with all of you.

im ok though! and i know I gotta do it alone.

just missing ya'll a little.

i've posted all my pictures on flickr as meinmihara. go take a look!

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language school

2008-08-19T15:50:00.000+09:00

This week I am in Saijo. This is Saijo. All first year JETs in the Hiroshima prefecture have been shipped off to language camp - a government sponsored center that gives intensive language and culture courses and throws in a bed and breakfast deal too. The lessons I am taking are pitched just right it seems - I recognise the feelings of frustration, ignorance and shocks of enlightenment from my lessons with Jenkin-sensei back home. This institute is something else. Imagine a Goethe Institute with a holiday Inn attached. Very nice indeed. The whole enteprise, like much of Japan is very eco conscious - when you get into your room you plug your room key into a slot on the wall and this allows you to turn on the lights and air con (meaning that if you arent in your room, these cant be running). clever ne? There are also seven different bins on each floor for trash: plastics, soda bottles, paper and other burnables, razors & glass, batteries and cans. okok thats only six but i cant remember the other one. The whole recycling shtick irritated me at first but now i feel extremely virtuous - taking 15 minutes to throw anything away.

last night i rented a DVD from the institute's library - it was a Japanese animation from the 80s called the old crocodile (me think). It was beautiful. A red ink crocodile on a brown paper forcing this octupus to fish for him by day. then at night he eats the octupus too - one leg at a time until its just a sorrowful black beak and eyes.

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Genki

2008-08-17T19:46:00.000+09:00

This past week I was off in Hiroshima city for orientation and upon my return i was struck with the cold from hell. It came from nowhere on thursday morning and by lunch time I was a fevered, lock jawed wreck. It is Obon week this week (a big festival where everyone in Japan returns to their family home) so the high school not to mention the town was emp.tee

It was in fact my headmaster and a sweet sweet man in 'Jim' - Japanese for Admin - who swaddled me off to Mihara hospital. It seemed so grave! But I had to go to the hospital only because all the local practices were closed for the week. Once in the hospital I came to realise how little Japanese I knew. Between sweet man from Jim (I wish I had dads facility for recalling names!) and a fluent gaijon friend over the phone we managed to establish that I was not pregnant, I was was nauseous, I had pain in the throat but no snot and that I was feverish but not dizzy. The man from Jim left me in reception assuring me that someone would bring me pills and I could pay the next day.

The next day I was very very sick indeed. The pills had had no effect. My glands had swollen so monsterously that it looked like my wisdoms had come out all over again and i couldnt even swallow my own spittle. A very sorry sight. My supervisor called to say he had heard I was poorly and did I need to go back to hospital. Yes please! Drive me please! He and his family were there in a flash (from the next town over) and they sat with me in a two hour queue at the hospital to see another doctor. The queue was mostly little old ladies with the highlight of a baseball player, uniform all muddy in the bum, holding an icepack on an alarmingly bulgy arm. His dad looked way more worried than my supervisor.

This time in the consultation all I had to do was sit and shiver and try to swallow spit while my supervisor and the doctor (imagine a Japanese doctor Dolittle wearing a paper shower cap) discussed whether I should get new pills or a drip. I was all for the drip. Mainline the Cure!! And in the end I got it and spent a blissful hour and a half in a low hospital bed with a drip quitly fixing me and nurses with all kings of charms and pens doodads dandling off their uniforms scuttling about. Oh, before the peace there was a bit of trouble finding a vein. I automatically gave them my left arm (blood donor arm, yeah, i got the scars, Im hardcore) but it was rejected after a rather painful first attempt and there followed a bizarre expedition up and down my right arm - two gentle pretty nurses walking there fingers up and down up and down until they found what they thought was a good spot - they would try the fluid would flow under the skin making balloons so they would start again. walky walky. pokey needle. i didnt mind in the least. I think I must be a bit of a hyper condriac but man, if i am in a hospital being seen to by pros with pro liquid medicine - its a valhallah

when i came off the drip the nurses checked my blood pressure with a tube machine that starts playing Satie when you slip you arm through. :)

and now three days one drip two consultations and a lot of meds later I am okelidokeli!! And the best part? Im on Japanese medical aid! All that stuff cost Three Fifty ZA Rands. hehe.

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cool hiroshima couple

2008-08-11T18:06:00.000+09:00

flat pics: finally!

2008-08-11T17:35:00.001+09:00

the view. im lucky hey?

my loo

living area angle 1

living area angle 2

bedroom angle 1

bedroom angle 2

yassa festival

2008-08-10T15:13:00.000+09:00

mihara's big local festival is called the Yassa. Yassa literally means hurry up. The revelries date back to the 1300s i think when mihara castle was being built and the local residents would get dressed up and dance around singing hurry up - build the castle!

the castle is gone but people still get dressed to the nines on friday and saturday night. every organisation, suburb or school forms a team who parade down the main drag in the MOST garish yukata you can imagine. turqoise satin and neon yellow yukata, ANC yukata, black and white formula one yukata. each group is separated by a vehicle of sorts (nissan, lexus, ambulance) covered in paper flowers and whenever a dancer gets parched they pop into the back of their slow moving vehicle and grab a beer.

tonight is the last night of the fest and there are going to be fireworks! I have heard that a japanese fireworks display is nothing to be scoffed at. lookin forward to it.

x

onsen

2008-08-10T15:03:00.000+09:00

on my last night of homestay Kikawa-sensei suggested we go to an onsen - a tradtional japanese hot spring. they area all over japan. hot water is leaking out everywhere.

the mihara onsen is nothing like i imagined - which was a remote pond on a mountain top. It was like a casino!! four storeys high with separate baths for men and women. in the change room are scores of wrinkly old ladies just cruising around in the buff. i was self conscious at first, my western proportions could not have been more other.

The bathing area is divided into a dozen or so different pools. some are the onsen themselves - brown cola water bubbling into tiled pools at around 40 degrees. I sat in these for a bit and then treid the novelty pools where you can get various bubble massages and even one where electric current is passed through the water making your muscles seize up so you become temporarily paralyzed - fingers crumpled against your chest. weird but good!

we wallowed for about an hour and then went back down to the public seating area in our gowns. there are giant tvs quitely playing japanese soapies and rows upon rows of lazy boy chairs. babies on mommies chests and old men are dotted about - all uit ge pas, its so peaceful. so thats what we did too. it was dim lit and air conditioned and heavenly.

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yukata

2008-08-10T14:33:00.001+09:00

A yukata is a summer kimono.

Last sunday I went to my supervisors mother in law for a day of japanese culture.

It was quite remarkable!

I arrived at the house and was whisked into the shower. When I emerged I was given a beautiful midnight blue yukata with pink blooms. The family asked if I was tired, which I was and the layed a futon out for me on the enclosed porch. I lay down and fell asleep with a view of mountains and rice paddies before me. utterly idyllic.

When i woke up the family had set up all the bits and bobs necessary for a small tea ceremony in the living area - a very japanese style room with screen doors, tatami mats, a low table surrounded by cushions and, behind one door the family shrine. Above the shrine are pictures of the deceased old folk in the family.

The tea we drank is made from a lime green powder that lookslike wasabi. you place two spoons in a bowl with a long stemmed bamboo spoon and then with a larger wooden ladle you take one spoon of water from a poitjie. all the stuff is layed out on the tatami so the process is done kneeling. the tea comes out bitter and frothy like cappucino foam. to soften the flavour you eat little blocks of ssweet gritty purple jelly. kind of like that spanish persimmon stuff. tres yum.

the tea stuff was then cleared away and my supervisors sister in law brought out sheets of delicate oragami paper in an array of sorbet colours. she taught me to fold a crane. it is very complicated and the final flourish involves pulling two triangular sticky out bits that turn out to be the wings. as you pull the centre puffs up with air and all of a sudden rather than a crumpled bit of paper you have a delicate little bird. these were the cranes that Sadako folded while sick with A bomb leukemia and they have become synonymous with peace and the bomb. On the following wednesday I took my little purple crane to the Sadako memorial in Hiroshima and placed among the hundreds of thousands of others that people lay at the foot of the monument.

After craft time the family whisked me into a pair of clogs and into the car. because of the language barrier, i had to simply wait and see where it was I was going. We drove up a hill not far from the house and then walked a few hundred metres (not as hard as you would think i yukata and clogs) and arrived at what looked like a very old temple that had been decked out in swags of white cotton. makeshift wooden benches had been set up in front of an outdoor stage and surrounding the benches were little stalls - some where you could write a wish or prayer on little cards and attach them to trees outside the temple; others selling slushies; another was manned by three rather beautiful japanese boys who helped you marble thin paper that you then slipped over a frame to make little square lanterns. the boys manning the stall were not dressed in temple attire at all: they were in skinny jeans and trucker caps - the japanese juxtaposition again! they took all the lanterns that had been made an arranged them slowly and artfully around the outdoor stage, lighting them so that as the sun set on they lit up the stage. if it sounds too beautiful to be true, its because it was. a priest in big flowing pistachio pants and a crisp white shirt then took to the stage an introduced three old ladies in black pants and matchy matchy jewel coloured tops. they sat amongst the lanterns and played on three japanese stringed instuments - i cant remember what they were called but theyhave about 12 strings and multiple brigdes that the ladies would shift mid tune with their nimble plastered fingers. when they were done the pistachio pants returned and introduced a cellist (who looked about sixteen but her real age is anyone guess as everyone here looks 10-20 years younger than they really are). She wore an eloborate crimson ballgown and opened her performance with The Swan which, of course, brought me to tears.

The scene was two picturesque for my jet lagged self to comprehend: evening dusk, wooden benches crammed with old people, babies asleep in their yukaktas, boys in indie gear in front of a shimmering stage; the light dancing in the river beside us.

TOO COOL!!!

nihongo computer

2008-08-07T18:08:00.000+09:00

i had high hopes of publishing a loooong post with millions of pictures but the internet cafe computers are in japanese and uploading images is a total nightmare when you cannot understand the functions! again a promise to try harder on the weekend and give ya'll a detailed photo diary

i have moved into my flat and got my bike. riding through the streets of mihara at night through tea bushes and buildings alike is completely exhilirating.

my flat is nice (pictures to come!) it has a little bit of a studenty feel due to serious furniture mismatching so this weekend i'm going to blow a bit of cash on nice japanese style cushions and rugs and things. it has an air con which in this weather is vital!

went to hiroshima memorial service last night. it was very moving, thousands of paper lanterns sailing down the river and crowds of suitably silent onlookers. i put a paper crane at the foot of the Sadako monument; i did feel a bit like a blazen cultural tourist but i think it was ok to go, ask Nixy pointed out, just as a sign of respect. I will spend monday through to wednesday next week in Hiroshima for prefectural orientation (read: enlgish teacher piss up) but hopefully i will have some time off and be able to visit the museum in the peace park. there is also a really good bookshop in Hiroshima and I'm keen to get my hands on some books that Peter Carey writes about in his book Wrong About Japan that I have just finished (Thankyou Rob!).

Still well, waiting for inevitable culture shock to kick in.

Much love and (hopefully not empty promises) to deliver on the weekend.

ok lets try again with a piccie:

aha! this blurry thing is the bridge in hiroshima memorial park. crowds watching lanterns sailing down the river.

a picture at last...

2008-08-07T18:04:00.000+09:00

two students practice for the concert competition. the school orchestra is really something!

jeez...where to start

2008-08-05T21:27:00.000+09:00

first off: fufu i got your comment on the blog so the reply is working fine :)

i really must sit down this weekend and a) upload photos. b) write down as best i can the stuff i have done in the last few days.

here is a list to whet your appetites and remind me on my return

tea ceremony
kimono
lantern making
oragami
temple concert (with a priest in pistachio trousers)
an onsen (traditional japanese hot spring - take the term traditional very lightly indeed)

it feels as though i could come home now and have a tome of tales. staying with the three unbelievably thoughtful and generous teachers from Mihara high was the ulitmate crash course introduction to this complicated and wonderful place!!

tomorrow i hope to go to the anniversary at peace memorial park in Hiroshima. the lantern i made on the weekend is for the ceremony. thousands of people light paper lanterns and send them down the river that passes memorial park. so im gearing up mentally for that a bit...

also moved into my apartment today and took to the streets of mihara on my bike!!

how does that dr suess rhyme go? 'the places you'll go, the things you will see!'

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sadako_Sasaki
this will tell you about Sadako Sasaki. You probably know about her already but i, in my hopeless ignorance only read her story today. She was a victim of the atomic bomb. There is a memorial to her in the peace park in Hiroshima city.

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getting cultured

2008-08-03T11:24:00.000+09:00

So this weekend I have been in Saijo staying with my supervisor. His home is a traditonal japanese one. Shoes off at the door - which is pretty standard - tables sunk into the floor. My room is walled on one side by canvas screens hiding cupboards and three sides by those ricey screens; one leading from the main entrance, one separating me from the room with the shrine in it and one side leading onto a corridor running along the back of the house. its exterior wall isnt a wall at all but panels of mosquito netting so what little breeze there is can flow through. i guess in winter you just screen the corridor off. Yesterday the lady of the household (whose name I have naturally forgotten - I have forgotten everyones names its acutely embarrassing) invited me to pray at the shrine. She had already placed an offering, a ball of rice, in a little cup up at the top of the shrine - which looks like a cupboard but inside are teirs and carvings and lights and lots of gold and lots of black and tsatkes. Following her instruction I lit a candle then lit incense from the candle and placed them deep in the cupboard. I then tapped a bowl two times with a bowl tapper. It made a satisfyingly religious bong. After this process you wrap beads around both hands and kneeling, always kneeling you say a prayer. The lady of the house speaks almost no english (about as much as i do japanese) so when it came time to explain the praying bit she mimed holding the beads and closed her eyes and said (and I quote) 'blahblahblah pray whatever'. It was delightful.

Later, in the 34% degree heat the family decided to take me out for a walk ostensibly to show me the train station as I would have to catch a train later that day. But actually we went shrine and sake mill hopping - two institutions treated with reverence. they were both interesting things but man, it was so hot and I had just consumed a traditional japanese breakfast (yoghurt, salad, miso soup, a bowl of rice, NATO, pickled seaweed and two cups of tea) so i was in no mood. to make matters worse, kaneshima-san insisted that i taste the sake on offer in the visitors room at one of the mills. it must be said that it was delicious, very light, not at all like the nail polish remover I have had at home... but damn! it was 34% degrees outside. the last thing i want to do was have 12 shots of sake. Luckily you can also taste various waters that are used in the sake making process. Kaneshima-san drank only water. He doesnt like sake.

Then I went to Daeo daeo - Japanese electronic store. Oh man. Dad. Ben. You would die. It was indescribably awesome!

Then off on the train to Fukuyama - Hiroshima prefecture's second biggest city. There i met the internationals at a beer garden: its a summer tradition that shopping malls open beer gardens on their roofs. You pay 3000 yen and from sx till eleven you can eat and drink as much as you like. Beer, spirits, tempura, salads, fish, yakitori and mountains of fresh cold watermelon. The atmosphere was great. The little fried things that turned out to be deep fried pig cartilage, not so great. Had to use Eastern style toilets again too but I think I am getting better at this. So watching the sun go down on the mountains of Fukuyama - all in all another good day!

good day!

2008-08-01T17:31:00.000+09:00

today i helped three third year students (matric equivalent) with their english speeches. it was so satisfying. they are stereotypically shy except the boy one who likes to break into lion king medlies. he liked me pictures of the kruger park one hell of a lot.

i apologise for the abscence of punctuation lately. these keyboards are a little hard to navigate.

today i tried melon milk from a vending machine. it costs about five rand, comes in a 500ml cup with ice and tastes bloody great. there are about 27 other things in the vending machine i am eager to try. oh! i taught the pupils today the word eager. they liked the kruger park pictures better.

will post photos on the weekend

x

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2008-07-31T22:04:00.000+09:00

my new cell phone is the weight and dimensions of a wonka bar. it can do a lot of things that i do not understand.

mum - i am　not posting at five in the morning. something is off with the clock on this pc, I swear.

today I discovered from my receipt that my alien resident card had my surname missspelled KAHAN. ooh vok. so i went to the town hall and said `here. wrong` as politely as I could and guess how long it took to fix? five mintues baby! either these people have nothing to do or they really are as efficient as everyone says.

food highlight of the day was honey bread. half a loaf of white bread soaked in honey and then toasted covered in whipped cream. not a traditional dish i am told.

and Okimoto-sensei prepared me a frozen tea to take to school. its a cheap summer tea called somethingsomething which tastes like very floral but weak coffee. yum yum (oshi oshi)

i took pictures of my school children today in their sailor suits playing the tuba outside; its 34 degrees.

Carrie I am so glad you are enjoying!! now write me an email lady!

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2008-07-30T21:20:00.000+09:00

well well well so much to tell!

the jet-lag has kicked in good and proper. only got two hours sleep last night ahead of what was a unique and tiring day.

headed off to hiroshima at noon. the smoking rooms in japanese airports are very depressing places! when i touched down in hiroshima prefecture (a prefecture is like a province) I, along with the other JETS was greeted by three people from my school - with a banner! I felt like a rock star. Martine, Kaneshima-san and Okimoko-san then escorted me through the green hills of Hiroshima o my new school and new life in Mihara...

I was whisked off first, to my suprise, to school where I met the principal and vice principal (that's Kyoto-san and Kocho-san...I think). Kaneshima-san, my sweet sweet supervisor, translated for us as we went through the school contract - the men seemed particularly adamant about my being on school grounds at 8:20. The headmaster said to me 'do you know the difference between high school in South Africa and high school in Japan? In Japan we are very punctual'. I must say, I have never been more terrified in my life: sweating, wearing the wrong shoes and sososo tired in a room with three distinguised, calm and serious men - all in blue shirts and black pants.

I then went to buy a watch (go figure) with Kaneshima-san guiding me through a department store and neighing at the prices of watches these days.

I then returned to school and in front of the staff - i had no choice - i shamefully transfered panties, shampoo and gifts from my big bag to my small one.

i also used a japanese style toilet. :(

then Okimoko-san and Kikawa-san who are teachers at the school took me to dinner and the prospect,　honestly, mortified me. I was SO tired, I speak no japanese and to top it all off we go to an Italian resturaunt. I thought I wouldn't survive. But i did. The food could not have been further from Italian kitsch. It was like a backward fusion style - the best Italian flavours simplified into a japanese style. So get this; we order a chef's salad, fried fish and okimoko-san has fresh garden vegetable pasta. The so called chef's salad is a delicate portion of italian lettuce topped with macerated onions, strips of pan seared beef and two blocks of vegetable terreine: wafer thin strips of carrot and mushroom suspended in gelatine that was lightly pickled in flavour. The fried fish was a whole sardine pan-seared on broccolli with a little portion of rattatouille and a single prawn - split down the middle - its head gunk removed and replaced with blobs of mayonnaise. the prawn had been seared too i think but grated tempura batter was piled on top. The pasta was italain spaggetti in a vinegarette topped again with wafer thin radish, broccolli, red pepper. every dish was so beautifully presented. very haute cuisine. and utterly delicious. delicate! i,m sorry to have rambled ala-jamie oliver or whatnot but it really was remarkable.

conversation was not at all formal or uncomfortable. these two japanese ladies were so kind to me. at no point did i feel that being polite pushed me to incinserity (which had been a major anxiety). my genuine suprise and enjoyment of the food and the company was huge.

tomorrow i get a cell phone. Kaneshima-san got me an english brochure (eigo no hon). They look bloody amazing. all the colours and whizz banging!

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Apple Ginza

2008-07-29T15:28:00.000+09:00

I bunked my orientation workshops (for the most part they're a total bore) and headed to the Apple store in Ginza. I rode the tokyo subway all by myself! Shinjuku 08 to Ginza 16 on the Marunouchi Line. Although the signs and voice prompts on the subway were mostly unintelligable, I recognised certain words und understood from the syntax whether it was a command or a direction or whatever. Domo arigatou gosimasu, Jenkin-san!

Apple Ginza is THEE Apple shop in Tokyo - THEE electronic capital? Well, it didnt disappoint. The facade is so minimalist its almost invisible; like the Anti-Voldemort headquarters in J.K Rowling's London : if you dont know about it you won't see it. Inside its four storeys. The chic store-people call your order through to the appropriate floor then a lift made of 4" glass top bottom and sides wisks you silently up where another chic store person (hair north facing rather than the first floor's south easterly style) is standing waiting with your product packaged at the till. WOWEE! Supre cool.

Sadly for me I arrived at this temple of neutral wet with sweat and red-faced with my hair in every direction (but mostly southerly. wet and plastered to my face). They were kind enough to pretend that I looked how I wanted to look - in my head.

Going to Mihara tomorrow. Hopefully the light will be different there or something and I can start taking photos that aren't utterly rubbish!

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whose the pro?

2008-07-28T23:49:00.000+09:00

A Japanese person just asked me for directions. i nearly died. I was so proud. couldnt help the poor fellow much though.

Today the minister of Arts, Culture and relations who was supposed to do the key note speech at our welcome was late because his train had stopped due to someone jumpin in front of it. heavy days!

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very small in japan

2008-07-28T13:23:00.000+09:00

Driving into Tokyo from Narita airport (a distance equivalent to OR Thambo - Jozi) these were the things that struck me.

The green: it is lush. But with plants completely unfamiliar. Both jungly in the tropical sense and foresty in the typical northern sense. Very beautiful.

The density. Buildings really are on top of one another. And they do not stop. But they are well proportioned - small mostly with lots of diagonals and cut-aways so that, although everything is on top of everything else, they accomodate eachother and it doesnt seem claustro.

Its also very very clean.

There are several rivers running through Tokyo with barges and bridges.

The city is aesthetic and planned to the enth degree. The words that came to mind were 'Western', 'European': I think i must rethink what those words stand for. The functionality and elegance isn't a function of being European - its from being first world. So this was a new thing that I learnt.

-
My hotel has a lending library of umbrellas outside. You put in a deposit and then you can take a beautiful white and lilac striped brolly with an ivory handle (that matches your outfit perfectly) with you around the town. It's drizzling on and off and the sky is white with constant cloud giving everything that photoshop inner glow.

My toilet has a bum washing button.

So here I am! Bloody hell. So lekker.

i'll post something more intelligable and picture packed soon. x

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I wanna see The Dark Knight soooo bad.

2008-07-24T04:07:00.000+09:00

all packed @ 25kgs

I'm all packed. I'm all visa-ed. And now I stand on a precipice I face a destiny in which there are three possible outcomes:

Probably: I'll see Dark Knight on the plane

Ideally: I'll see Dark Knight In Tokyo!! On Imax!!

Or, and if this be the case I'll cry: I'll see it in like five years time, all pixelated on a laptop. God forbid.

Reading pack

2008-07-22T03:49:00.000+09:00

These are the books I'm taking - they are a good blend of read, unread, serious and not-so-serious. A bit euro-centric. But that's how I roll...for now.

Pretty Girl In Crimson Rose - Sandy Balfour
The Kraken Wakes - John Wyndham
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton
Laughter in the Dark - Vladimir Nabokov
Howards End - E.M Forster
Turn of the Screw - Henry James
The Caves of Steel; The Rest of the Robots - Isaac Asimov
All Quiet on The Western Front - Enrich Maria Remarque

For the plane: probably Gatsby which i first read on a plane - Cape Town to Jo'burg 2000. And maybe Howards End.

Initials

2008-07-21T05:41:00.000+09:00

I'm not in Mihara but in seven sleeps time...no...like ten sleeps, I will be.

Naturally, it is an adventure into the unknown. But one thing is certain: I will have an Inkan.
My supervisor, Kaneshima-san, known only to me via gmail (Chatter anyone?) is having it made right now. Probably. No...in like four hours maybe. The Inkan maker is still asleep. In four hours time he will be awake, my Inkan will be ordered and in the pipeline...

'What is an Inkan?' they cried.
'Who are they?' I cried.
'We asked first!' they cried.
'Very well,' I said...

An Inkan, as far as I know, is a stamp that you use instead of a signature on official documents. My friend Darryl showed me his Chinese equivalent and my god, what a beautiful thing! Mine will be my name - Jemma - in Katakana - Japanese script for foreign words. If I'm not wrong, it'll look something like this:

cool hey?
'yes', they said