new photos

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

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

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

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

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
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the waving cat

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

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.