Kumamoto and Costco

Japan is a land of contrasts. In my JET interview, they asked me what my impressions of Japan were, and I answered that Japan seems like a very modern country (think the huge lit up signs of Tokyo, bullet trains, robot technology etc) with a long, traditional past (gardens, castles, shrines) and this past weekend cemented these two images in my mind.

On Saturday, Arthur, Brad and I took the train (not the bullet train) to Kumamoto, about an hour south of Kurume to see the lovely tourist-y sites the city has to offer. Unfortunately the cooler weather we had the first few days of the week didn't stay and the morning was really hot and humid, but we persevered and took in Kumamoto Castle (which was celebrating its 400th b-day, although the building you see today is actually a reconstruction. Details, details) the Former Hosokawa Gyobutei, which is an old samurai mansion just through a park and down the street from the castle, lunch at Skylark, which is sort of like a Japanese Denny's and the amazingly beautiful Suizenji Park before grabbing the train back to Kurume for dinner and bowling. It was a great day, and I really felt like I was in Japan, but it was also a really long day. I left my apartment around 9 AM and didn't get back until 11:30 or so. Phew. I did get some lovely photos though.

The natural river moat close to the castle.

Me striking the typical Japanese tourist pose at the castle.

Oh look, a Japanese tour group.

The view from the top of the castle. Not too shabby.

The samurai mansion's front gate and impecable rock garden. Arthur confessed to having the the same urge that I have when looking at the nicely raked rocks--let's mess them up! We were able to control ourselves on this particular ocasion.

One of several courtyards in the samurai mansion. We happened to be the only people visiting at the time, so it had a very serene atmosphere that I really liked. I wouldn't mind living there, except that the house went on forever, and I definitely wouldn't want to have to clean it. Even my apartment is too big when I have to clean it.

Suijenzi Park. The park was created to emulate the 53 stations along the old road from Tokyo to Kyoto, so everything was carefully simulated to look like the real thing. Mini Mount Fuji above. Some gorge below. I love that from this picture it could be several stories down to the water level, but no, those are miniature trees, and the water is probably about 5 feet below the bridge I was standing on.

Arthur and Brad hamming it up under the red torii infront of one of the two shrines in the park. The more red gates you walk under, the better luck you are supposed to have.

What Japanese garden is complete without GIGANTIC koi? We watched the koi for a long while after our loop of the garden and I tried to sneak them some cookie crumbs without anyone seeing.

The cute little trolley we used to get from place to place in Kumamoto. The stops of interest to tourists were the only ones announced in both Japanese and English, which made it pretty easy to know where to get off.




Japanese bowling shoes! Way more modern than the American versions, and surprisingly comfy too.
And of course, it's Japan so all the balls are color coded according to weight and can actually be found where they say they will be. Soooooo organized. We were about the only group at the lanes on a Saturday night that wasn't part of some league and the only group bowling well under 200 a game. I really wish the Japanese would embrace more casual sports. It makes it hard for a dabbler like me.

[Side note: this morning, I went to school to play volleyball with the teachers and the parents. It turned out there were 4 teams total, one of parents, one of teachers, and two of students. The parents that showed up to play were all part of some volleyball league, and won the tournament, surprise surprise. The 3rd year students came in second, and the teachers took third, but only because we were slightly more coordinated than the poor first year students who didn't win a single game. We played for almost 3 hours in the un-airconditioned gym before they fed us lunch and presented the parents team with an old dusty trophy. I came home, and promptly took a shower and a nap]


Sunday was a bit more restful, but included a venture to Costco of all places, which is about an hour away by car. Johnathan and Kendra were kind enough to invite Allison and I along with them to stock up on some "American" staples ("American" in parentheses b/c one of the things we all bought was tortillas). It was an "out-of-country" experience. Except for the aisle or two of Japanese products and slightly higher prices, the Costco was practically identical to the one I know so well at home in Scottsdale, including the SUV-sized shopping carts. They even had the food court with its delicious hot dogs and churros for a whopping total of 383 yen.

Allison and I made it out of there with a combined total of under $150 worth of stuff, which I thought was pretty good. We stocked up on some canned soup, canned beans, the aforementioned tortillas, some cheese, hummus!!!, and one of those flats of "bariety mafuins" (Japanese spelling) which we split. It was quite the adventure, and looking at the cart and the car we had, its a miracle it all got home, but it did just fine. I held the "mafuins" in my lap.

Shorter but nevertheless exceptional things...

**With a lot of help from my fellow JETs, we've booked a trip to Hokkaido in February for the Snow Festival. We got some of the last seats/rooms. The excessive pre-planning done by the Japanese is a bit crazy, and I am sooooooooo excited that we're going. I will most likely be very cold the whole weekend, but it will definitely be worth it.

**I have made another edible dish following a recipe from the internet. This one was for a tofu marinade which I soaked the tofu in for a day and then stir fried with other veggies. Yummy.

** I bought a bed!! I was left a simple metal frame affair by my predecessor, but it collapsed under my wide American butt the first time I sat up abruptly in the middle of the night. So my futon has been on the floor, which has worked just fine, although I got into the habit of just walking on top of it to get across the room which made it feel more like a squishy carpet than a place to sleep. So with some intrepid digging at the local second hand store (thanks Allison for your help) I came across a real beauty of a bed that now takes up a large percentage of my bedroom. It has a real headboard and mattress, is more than 3 inches off the floor and has storage drawers underneath. The only drawback is that I now have to find some real sheets, but I think I can handle that. Waking up in the mornings has gotten much more difficult of late.

BEFORE:

AFTER:

**Last Friday, 9/14, the Kita-Chikugo Board of Education threw a welcome new ALTs/farewell old ALT supervisor party. It was at typical Japanese style restaurant at the top of a hotel downtown and was very nice. Also in the typical Japanese style, there was lots of alcohol, and the very serious reserved and hardworking people we were used to seeing in the office were slinging their arms around each other, laughing and much more talkative than normal. I was asked how my parents felt about me being so far away and told that if I was the daughter of one of my Japanese co-workers I would never be allowed to leave home, but if I was a son, I could go anywhere and no one would think twice about it. One guy also asked if I thought I got paid too much, because he thought the ALTs made out very well for the amount of actual work that we do. Maybe I do, but I am not going to admit it. ;-)

Dinner was sukiyaki style where lots of meat, mushrooms, cabbage, some tofu and noodles are cooked in a soy-based sauce right at the table. The Japanese then crack a raw egg into a bowl and pour the hot soupy mix on top. I tried the egg and was not nearly as revolted as I thought I would be. It was a tad slimy, but the the flavor was completely obscured by the sauce which was nice.

The crowning moment of the enkai was teaching our supervisor with the steel liver the art of sake bombing.

The regular party was followed by the after party, a much smaller English language affair and a trip to karaoke (of course).

...that Sunday. Finally.

So...anyways...the last Sunday before school started (which was 2 weeks ago now!) Kendra's school, Kurume High School had their annual Sports Day. Almost every school, junior high and high school has a Sports Day once a year. My school, Araki Jr. High had theirs in April or May, but its common to have them in early September so the students can spend their summer vacations practicing---Japanese "vacation" is mostly in theory only. Its common for high school students especially to even spend their weekends at school studying. Gah!

But two Sundays ago, there were no books, instead the whole school broke into 3 teams, each with a color scheme and competed in some good old fashioned field day activities...with Japanese intensity of course. There were lots of relays: relays with people carrying heavy sacks,

an interesting one where one person ran the first 1/4 of the track, and then two people tied together ran the next 1/4, and then 3 people, and then 4 people finished the circuit,

there were also the basics with batons and really fast runners.

There were also two versions of tug of war. The boys competed in the tradtional 50 or so people on a side of an incredibly long rope, while the girls took part in a "steal the bacon"-ish competition where 8 shorter ropes lay in the middle of the field and the two teams lined up on either end. At the whistle, they rand to the middle and grabbed as many ropes as they could and dragged them (with the opposing team memebers hanging off of them) back over to their respective sides.

Some of the more entertaining events were the 40 + legged races where 20ish people were all tied together and had to run down the field. The three student teams competed first, and the amount of practice they had put in really showed. They counted "one, two" to keep everyone on the same foot. They all kept a good pace, "ich, ni, ich, ni, ich, ni." Their stellar performances were followed by a team of the teachers, who hadn't practiced nearly enough. Their counting ws much slower, "ich...ni...ich...ni" and they had to stop at least twice en route down the field to realign themselves and start over.

Each team also had a large coreographed dance number involving a good number of its members. Each group had costumes...cowboys, top hats and maids. Some of the cowboys had mischeviously placed the flowers on their pants right on their crotches, much to my amusement, although if I had been judging, I would have marked them down just a bit for lack of professionalism.

Then there was the ...uh, what was it called? The four man shirtless chicken fights where I thought for sure someone was going to break an appendage. Three guys on the bottom supported the top one, and the group would face off with another one and the guys on top would grab at each other and try to knock the other to the ground. It was one of the more intense events, complete with some of the most intense shirt tans I have ever seen. And to my knowledge, no one broke any body parts.

The best was saved for last though, the card/dance/chanting numbers, where the hours spent practicing really showed. I took two videos, and I hope they work because it is much better to see them than for me to try and describe them. What probably doesn't show up very well is the threatening dark sky and peals of thunder in the not so far distance. It added to the serious competitiveness of the event.

I can't wait for Araki's Sports Day in the Spring ;-)

"Summer days driftin' away"

My first month in Kurume went by rediculously fast. All of a sudden, it was the last day of August, the last day I would have to sit in the Board of Education office for another month or so, and "Labor Day" weekend was upon us. Japan doesn't celebrate Labor Day, instead it was the first day of school, but I was determined to make the most of the weekend anyway, not knowing what the school year would bring (still trying to figure that all out).

Saturday:

I've been wanting to go to the beach for a while now. It's hot everywhere you go, so you might as well go to a body of water and submerge yourself. So I did. Dave mustered up the energy to leave for the station with me at 10 AM, and we were off. I planned to meet up with Brad, my friend from the plane ride from Tokyo to Fukuoka at the train station, and then we were all going to get on the bus and head to the beach for a day of nothing. It took a while to find Brad, but since we finally all had cell phones, it was actually not too hard. I had gotten used to not having one, and hadn't really needed one, except when I got lost at the train station. These train stations seem to cause all of the communication breakdowns...if I never took the train, maybe I wouldn't need a cellphone, but seeing as how the trains are rather vital to getting around, I am glad to have the phone. We got on the bus with a group of kids Dave and I had seen at the station. They looked like your typical Tenjin crowd, all trying hard in their silly baggy clothes, except that they were all communicating in sign language. It was straight out of the movie Babel.

We got off at the end of the bus route near Momochi Beach Park, which is right at the foot of Fukuoka Tower and near Yahoo Dome, where the Soft Bank Hawks play baseball. The Fukuoka Tower is a tower...that charges people to go up and look at the view. It's tall, but it was kind of overcast, so we decided the trip up was probably not really worth the $8 and, my lovely insider's guidebook I got at orientation said the nearby JAL Hotel has a similar view for free. But not wanting to rush things on the beach, we didn't go up there either. Next time.

Instead we laid on the sand under a big tent for many hours, enjoying the sparsely populated beach and listening to the sound of the "Japanese-sized" waves, which was occasionally interrupted by the PA system which played this weird Sesame Street song with lyrics no one could understand. We grabbed lunch from the vendors on the beach; I had takoyaki (fried octopus balls) and a sweet pineapple slush drink. The water, which was supposed to be inundated with jelly fish was devine. Very salty though...I felt really sticky for the rest of the day, and the sun definitely wore me out.

The view from my towel.

Saturday night was the annual yakitori festival in Kurume, so we wanted to get back in time for that. We left the park, but not before de-sanding our feet in the lovely fountains and buying some ice cream from one of the vending machines across the street. My mint chocolate chip gave me a whole new lease on life, and as we were waiting for the bus, Dave contemplated sprinting back for another one.

Brad came back on the train to get his fill at the yakitori (meat, well technically, a bird on a stick) festival. It took place in the square near the main post office, not too far from the station in downtown Kurume. From a block away we could smell the smoke, and the whole square was ringed with various carts/tents hawking grilled goodness on sticks, as well as what went well with said items...beer, edamame, rice etc.

We got a good selection, and then sat outside of the madness with other Kurume JETs, including my upstairs neighbors, Kendra and Johnathan.

After we'd had our fill, we listened to the bluegrass band for a little while before people had to move on to various other commitments. We made plans to reunite later in the evening for some karaoke, and the time in between nearly killed me. I could have sworn it was 10:30 at the earliest, when it was really only 8:15. I powered through, and made it almost to midnight, at which point I unceremoniously dropped Brad at the train station and biked home, took a shower and went straight to sleep before my big day on Sunday.

To be continued.....

The most important 30 minutes of my life

Alas this entry is somewhat long overdue, and a as a result is going to mess up the nice sequence I was attempting to maintain, but such is life. If it was always orderly and went the way you planned, it would get boring.



Fridays in August were taken up by a string of special activities. The first was the tour of Kurume with the university students, the next was our prefectural orientation in Fukuoka (when I went to the wrong train station, and arrived out of breath and very sweaty just before it started. All I could think about the whole time was the cold beer waiting for me at the beer garden afterwards. I hope I wasn't supposed to learn anything that day). The Friday following the orientation involved a second trip to Fukuoka, this time to the Prefectural Board of Education Building (yes, its as imposing as it sounds) for the annual "Bowing Ceremony." The official title is more like "Contract Signing Ceremony," but no one actually signs any contracts. This time, with a big head start, I managed to stay with my co-workers and arrive in plenty of time, but still sweaty because this event is one of the few that requires a suit and it was probably about 98F and humid. I am beginning to wonder if it really does get cold here...

This is the only picture I dared take before the seriousness began. Look at all those dark suits.

Outside of the room where the ceremony was to take place they had several tables where we signed in and found our places on the seating chart. The room itself looked a lot like McKenna Auditorium at CMC (for those of you who know the 5 C's) but larger and with a higher ceiling. There were even desks lined up with numbers on them. I found my place, sat down and made small talk with the other JETs, all looking similarly uncomfortable in their suits. An important guy then gave us directions about when to stand up, bow and sit down and told us the ceremony would begin at 2:55 and last 30 minutes. Just before 2:55, he told us it was about to begin, and that we should be quiet and looking straight ahead when the VIPs came in. So we all got quiet....but nothing happened for a while (the actual time is up for debate, some think it was only 5 minutes, I say it was closer to 8, and some even think it was 20 minutes of uncomfortable silence). Allison got the hiccups. Still no VIP arrival. Still very quiet, and finally the back doors open and the VIPs come in followed by one very late JET. Whoops. The VIPs take their seats off to the side and are introduced. The most important one present (not the most important of all, but the most important with time in his schedule to watch 150 some foreigners bow to him) takes the stage. The name calling commences. Name and school/school district read; stand, bow, sit back down. I was in the back, so I got to watch how it was all done before they got to my name, but it was incredibly nerve wracking all the same. Then there were some speeches. And then, exactly 30 minutes after it started it was all over and we could breathe again.

Back to School

As usual, I am at least a week behind, but this time I have a good excuse. School started up on September 3rd and has being sucking up all my time and energy since then.

I spent the whole week at Araki Jr High where I gave my self introduction at least 12 times to some of the 400 or so students there. There are still a few classes I haven't been to yet, so I will still be doing the same thing for part of next week (This is a picture of Arizona...Arizona is a desert...It is very hot... There are not very many trees...Arizona is famous for the Grand Canyon...blah blah blah.) In the 2nd and 3rd year classes, they break into groups following my presentation and I ask them questions to see if they were really listening, and in general, they do very well. Some tricky words that escape them are saguaro (too close to the Japanese word for cactus, saboten) and roadrunner. One kid thought the green stuff on my favorite sandwich was wasabi instead of avocado. Another guessed that my younger brother was 54 years old. All in all, its been a very entertaining week!

Japanese school is quite interesting in itself. At Araki, there are 3 grades (equivalent to 7th thru 9th in the States I believe) and each grade is split into 4 classes. These classes each have an assigned classroom they stay in for the whole day while the teachers go in and out to teach the various subjects. I pity the kids stuck on the 3rd floor...none of the classrooms have A/C which is pretty brutal, but the 3rd floor has no moving air what so ever. I felt like I was in a sauna when I went up there. It amazes me the kids are not passed out on the floor, and I wonder if these kids have worse test scores than their compatriots on the 2nd floor, where there is somewhat of a breeze coming through. The kids also eat lunch (unsupervised!) in these homerooms. But Japan is known for its group society, and overall, the kids are rather disciplined, especially when it comes to their after school clubs. Each club has an advisor, but whether or not they are present at practice does not really seem to matter. I spent Wednesday with the badminton club,* which had both advisers present, but across the gym, the four person volleyball club was on their own, and running a very regimented practice. Later, I walked outside as the baseball club was finishing up for the day, and they were raking the field and putting everything away in its proper place without any supervision. The track team was also stretching in unison before heading home.

*I would just like to note that the the badminton club had roughly 50 members while the volleyball club had 4 (we're not at Horizon High School anymore Toto) yet they were allotted the same amount of gym space. Hmmmmmm. There are also 2 dozen boys in the badminton club...the practice was nicely segregated; the boys performed specific drills while the girls rallied the whole time. Not sure how I feel about that....