Takayama

The next morning our first stop as a group was Takayama Jinya, Takayama’s old city-hall like building, I guess. 

The courts and prison and stuff were all located there, as well as city officials going about their business, keeping an eye on other parts of Japan in case war were to break out, etc.  I can’t remember what era the Jinya dates back from, or really what jinya means.  We got a tour but it was hard to understand, and I only took pictures of the stuff that was interesting.
For example, this tea kettle, hanging over a fire pit. 

The handle you use to lift it up off the flame is shaped like a fish, to protect against fires!  In the servant’s quarters the handle was shaped like some kind of baton, shaking which is supposed to be a charm to attract more money.

There was a kitchen inside, which I thought was interesting.

Store room

Lined up against the wall there are all tiles to be used to retile the roof

In another room some koto players were entertaining tourists.  I’d never seen a koto played before, so I thought it was really interesting!  I recorded some of it if you’re curious.

After that the next room we saw that was interesting enough to warrant a photo was the prison, and some lovely demonstrations of all of the various torture device contained therein.

Stringing people up, beating people with bamboo canes, and by far the most creative: Being forced to sit seiza (kneeling with one’s feet tucked underneath -- not comfortable for people not used to it under the best circumstances) on a jagged platform, with heavy stone bricks placed on top of your knees! 

Nothing is scary than an old Japanese volunteer guide picking up a bamboo cane and saying “Does anyone want to give it a try? 

After that we had free time to wander around the old part of the city.  Along the river there was a farmer’s market going on, so I wanted to stop by.  But in the end we spent too much time there, and all the shops along the river were overly touristy, so we missed all the good stuff.

I had just enough time to go to a sake store and try a sample and get laughed at by old Japanese men.  But it was really quite tasty!

There were ducks on the river though!  They were cute.  They were swimming against the current to stay in place, so every so often they’d just get tired or decide to take a break, stop paddling, and go drifting back down the river again for a couple feet.

As we were driving towards our next stop on our bus, I saw this really pretty town in the mountains and snapped a couple pictures.  Turns out, it was where we were stopping next!

Our destination there was a food sample factory.  In Japanese restaurants there are almost always plastic samples of the meals for sale on display in the windows, so you can have an idea of what you’re ordering before you sit down to eat.  It’s especially handy for we foreigners who often have no idea what we’re ordering.
At this place, we had the opportunity to make some.  We made tempura!   It was actually much simpler than I thought it would be.  We started out with little plastic vegetables and shrimp and fish and stuff.  Then we had yellow wax which we drizzled into a vat of cooler water.  Then we wrapped the plastic food in the wax dribbles.

We also made lettuce out of wax but it turned out really bad.  It was a lot more difficult.
The whole process was pretty cool though.

Typhoon Adventures, Part 1

My host mom bought me chocolate on chocolate cream Pocky! :D It’s so fluffy and delicious!  It’s funny because instead of saying チョコレート (chokoreto)  or チョコ(choko) like chocolate things normally do in Japan, it says ショコラ (shokora).  I guess it’s trying to be pseudo-classy, like chocolat  or something.

Is that even how you’d spell that?  “Chocolate” doesn’t look like a word anymore.

This is bad, now I’m just going to eat all this Pocky! Why are there only three sticks per package?!!

--

This has been quite an interesting week, and it’s only Wednesday!

On Monday, we had class as normal, but my research methods professor, who studies gender in festivals, wanted us to come, if we could, to a festival in Imaike, a few subway stops away from school, after class with him. 

Imaike is an interesting place because, if I’m remembering the history he told us right, it used to be outside the borders of Nagoya.  It was where a train line ended, so a lot of people got off there and it boomed as a result of that.  Lots of drinking establishments popped up, and the area is very multi-ethnic, with a lot of Chinese and Korean immigrants.  When the subways were put in people stopped getting off there and going into the neighborhood, so it fell into some decline.  In particular after World War II it became known as a big cabaret area, kind-of seedy.  Today there are still a ton of bars and pachinko parlors.  Anyway, this festival is actually run by the store owners’ association, to try to draw people there.  There are the traditional Japanese festival booths selling food and games for children and stuff, but there’s also like, the Lion’s Club doing a yard sale, and advertisements for the supermarket, and booths for info about community organizations. 

When I told my host mom, who is a woman in her early 60s, that I was going to Imaike, she had an interesting reaction.  She said it was full of bars and pachinko parlors, but if I was going with my teacher and my class it would be okay. “Just stick with your teacher!!” 

My professor laughed when I told him about this.  He’s an Australian guy in his 40s who’s been living in Japan since he was in his 20s who still acts quite a bit younger.  (He insists we call him by his first name, sometimes takes his shoes off when he’s teaching, and on this day he was wearing jeans and a white t-shirt with the communist sickle and hammer symbol on it.)  He said something to the extent of “That’s one of the things I like about this part of town!” 

Well, as you may remember, we’re on typhoon 15 of the season here, and as of Tuesday it started coming Nagoya-ward in earnest.  The rain started in the afternoon.  It let up for a bit when we left our class at 5:30, and was okay when we got to the festival around 6:30.  “If it rains too hard we can always go to an izakaya,” our professor told us.  (An izakaya is the Japanese version of a pub.  I’m coming to really love them.)   We decided we’d all split up and explore a bit and reconvene in an hour, at which point we’d decide if we wanted to do dinner together, or what. 

Well the rain didn’t hold off for very long.  I had just long enough to buy a stick of mitarashi dango (kind-of like dumplings, I guess? The sauce is kind-of sweet, like a soy sauce + sugar taste.  When they’re hot and fresh they’re delicious!) before it started pouring on us! Me and Michael, one of my classmates who’d wandered the same direction as me, ducked under a stand for cover, where I took the only pictures I was able to take on my camera.  Which is a real shame, because I couldn’t capture the size of the festival, or the colorful lights.  We got a phone call from our professor, and decided to all meet back and then make a run for somewhere to eat. 

We made a mad dash for an izakaya up the street that our professor knew, and ducked in for food and drinks. 

Izakaya are Japanese pubs.  You typically take off your shoes and step up onto a raised  platform.  Depending on the set up, you’re either sitting/kneeling on the floor on cushions, or the floor is sunk deeper under the table so you’re still sitting on cushions on the floor, but you can sit normally with your feet under the table.  There’s food (good traditional Japanese food!) and there’s drinks, and there’s often a 飲み放題 (nomihodai), or all-you-can-drink, option where you pay a set rate for unlimited drinks that usually also includes some kind of food dishes.  The table next to us was full of very drunk Japanese men. 

Anyway, the food is good, and unlike bars in the US or pubs in the UK, it’s not revolving around sports and like, going out with the boys, so the atmosphere is much better.  I’m sure it gets rowdy and smoky late (Japan doesn’t really restrict smoking in restaurants the same way as in the US.  Carolyn and I were in a restaurant last weekend and a woman came in as we were finishing up.  After she said something to the waitress, the waitress asked the other patron who was eating there if she was okay with smoking.  She said she was, and then the woman proceeded to smoke her cigarette as she was deciding what to order.).  Anyway, I’m sure the izakaya get rowdy and smoky as the night goes on, but it also seems like an excellent place to develop some camaraderie with local people.  If I were living in Japan, trying to learn Japanese, I would absolutely go to an izakaya and just try to start talking to people.  Societal rules are laxer in places like these.  When some of my friends and I went out one night, I had to leave early to catch the train home, but apparently later they started playing a drinking game with some Nanzan University athletes who were sitting a table over!  I myself got into a conversation with a woman while waiting in line for the bathroom.

So, anyway, we went to the izakaya and our professor started explaining the menu to us and asking us what we wanted to try.  He took our drink orders and ordered a salad and a handful of small plates: grilled things on skewers.  One was chicken and leek, one was grilled tomato wrapped in what I think was bacon.  There was something else I’m forgetting about, but the most interesting food item, which of course I forgot the name of, involved half-cooked chicken!  It was chicken on a skewer, but raw on the inside, with a line of tart but kind-of sweet plum sauce, and sliced shiso leaves on top.  Shiso is a Japanese leafy vegetable that seems to be in everything.  It’s green (though there’s also a purple variety -- not sure if this is an age thing or a different species), and I can’t really describe the taste, but I’m starting to really like it.  I have shiso salad dressing on my salads every night. The chicken-plum-shiso skewers were delicious!

After that we had ochatsuke, a bowl of rice with some kind of flavoring or topping, with ocha, or green tea, poured over the top.  Apparently it’s traditional to order and eat that last, after you’ve done all your eating and drinking.  It did seem very palate-calming.  I had ume (pickled plum - very sour!) flavored ochatsuke. 

Our professor treated us all to the izakaya meal!! 

After hanging out and chatting and eating and drinking, the rain seemed to have let up, so we went to try to check out the festival again.  There was still a bit of a concert going on, and we found someone spinning fire, but most everyone had packed up their stalls.  

(At this point my camera also ran out of battery.)

Our professor told us he wanted to show us some more stuff.  We walked by a big pachinko parlor, and he asked us if we’d done that yet.  We said no, so he said “Okay let’s just do a 10 minute look-see shall we?”  We went in the door from outside and then through a second automatic door.  As soon as that second automatic door opened, the noise was just INCREDIBLE.  The whole place was full of the clattering of pachinko balls and the whir of the game machines.  No one was saying anything.  They were all staring at the screens, pushing their buttons, and puffing away on their cigarettes.  Still, the sound was almost deafening!  Some people had huge stacks of baskets and baskets full of balls that they’d one! 

It’s gambling, but it’s officially a game for prizes.  Apparently if you take your balls out back to a shady counter behind the shop, though, they cash it out for you.  There’s no real secret about that, either. 

After pachinko, Alisha and I decided we’d better take the train home soon.  It was already approaching 9 and I had a quiz the next morning.  Our professor walked us to the nearest JR station, but first we stopped by another thing he wanted to show us: a gomen nasai jizo (I’m sorry statue).  It was a little statue in an alcove along one of the streets.  The sign explained that if you hurt someone's feelings you write it on a little card and apologize to the statue and then you’re forgiven.  There were tons of little cards hanging in the little alcove.  We also walked by a shrine where there was apparently a statue of a boar or a bull or something and if you rub it’s nose you’ll do well in school.  Maybe we all need to go back there.

At the train station, our professor dropped Alisha and I off and we got on what we expected to be the 8:38 train.  I texted my host mom as normal, telling her I was on my way home.

Except the train didn’t move.

And then it still didn’t move.

There were all these announcements in Japanese, but I couldn’t really understand them, and everyone just seemed to be sitting on the train waiting.

I got that there was something about heavy rain, and told my host mom this, and she just said to text back when it actually start moving again.

We ended up waiting on that train for almost two hours!  So my normal hour commute home took me 3 hours.

Oiii.

But that wasn’t to be the end of my typhoon adventures! Oh no.

 Stay tuned for Typhoon Advenutres: Part 2, coming soon to a blog near you!

We'll pretend it's still 9/1

9/1/11
I’m so tired!  Today has been a long day! Fun, but long. 
I’m lying on my futon right now and each time it’s much more comfortable than I expect it to be.  I keep drifting off, and it’s only nine o’clock.  Granted, I’ve been up since 6:30, but still!

First, I’m going to respond to comments:
Mom, I’ll try to make sure I keep the updates coming.  Regarding the fish, at first I kinda stabbed at it with my chopsticks because I wasn’t sure what to do with it, but then we were told we could eat it with our hands, and just to pull the finds off and bite in. So I just picked it up and bit into its stomach.  You don’t eat the head or the tail or the bones of that fish.  If it were a smaller fish you could.   It tasted pretty weird.  There wasn’t a lot of meat in it and the entire belly was full of eggs.  Kind-of disturbing, but when in Rome!

Shaun, I want to the onsen twice today.  Yessssssssssss.

This morning we were greeted by a lovely rainbow outside the window of the room where we were eating breakfast.  I really like Japanese breakfast.  Rice, miso soup, nori, egg, a bit of salad, pickles, some fish... There were also these little meatballs, some dumpling things, and grapefruit wedges.  Beats the heck out of cereal.

After that we had 3 more hours of Japanese class. ;A;
Iris and I and a couple other people from our class yesterday moved up to the more advanced Japanese class today.  It was challenging, but it was worth it.  I could still mostly follow what was going on, and it was an actual challenge so it didn’t feel like I was wasting my time.

After class we had a break for lunch.  Is there something about Thursdays in Japan? It seemed like most of the restaurants, and the souvenir shop, on the main drag outside our hotel were closed.  There were also a lot more Japanese tourists today.  Is September 1 a holiday I didn’t know about?
After walking over a couple blocks, several of us found a mom-and-pop-looking restaurant that served mostly curry dishes.  I got katsu curry rice, Shaun! Yummmm.

We met up at our ryokan and then met our tour guides for a tour of Inuyama and a couple of its museums. 

On the way we ran into some re-enactors.  I forgot who they all said they were, but relatives of Oda Nobunaga and Tokugawa Ieyasu (I think.  Those are the only famous Japanese historical figures I know the names of... I don’t even remember if they belong in the same era, so I might be totally wrong about this.  Shaun? Anyone?) The tour guides wanted to take a picture of us with them.  One of the girls on our program got someone to take one with her camera, too, so hopefully I’ll get to see it eventually.  I do have this picture of them by themselves that we were able to take later, though.

Our first stop was the town hall, where we went into a room and practiced 書道 (shodou), calligraphy.  Our teacher had been a calligraphy artist for sixty years.  She’d done calligraphy performances all over the world, in the US and the UK.  She was really fascinating.  I don’t think I ever understood why anyone would want to do calligraphy before today.   

She had us writing 愛 (ai), the character for love.  She explained that she chose “love” because it was a word we would always need.  The character could be used to express “to love someone” or “to be loved by someone” or “liking something” or “thinking something is cute”.   She challenged us to really put our feeling of 愛 into writing it, and that that was more important than the correctness of the strokes.  She demonstrate by writing big, on the white board, using her entire arm, a very stylized version of 愛。At one point, going around the room as we were practicing, she suggested we try writing it in a single breath.  I must have made a scared face because she and her interpreter and some of the volunteers started laughing and said “You can just try, you don’t have to do it!” 

She walked around and commented on people’s 愛, saying they needed to be stronger, or less tentative, things like that.  She corrected my posture, holding my arm out and moving my hand so that each stroke had a kind of “flick” at the end of it.  I felt like I was feeling the mojo more.  I still didn’t like the way mine looked, but one of the volunteers told me it looked good, that it looked about as good as a normal Japanese person’s attempt would look.  That made me appreciate our teacher’s sixty-some-odd years of 書道 experience more.  When we see calligraphy exported here to the US we really only see the masters’ work, you know?  It’s hard to appreciate what normal handwriting and stuff looks like.

After we used up all of our practice paper and did one we hopefully liked most on nice paper, we put them all up on the window sill and the board in front of the room.  Our teacher looked at them all and said they were very good for the short amount of time we’d had.  She said that, just like love, even though we were all writing the same character, none of them were the same.  She told us we should try to write 愛 again throughout our lives because while are love was young now, it would change shape and form in our 30s and our 40s. 
I know it sounds weird, but the whole experience was strangely beautiful. It was probably just because we were talking about love and I’m a huge sap. But it makes me reconsider taking 書道 at Nanzan.

(Readers, if there are any of you other than Shaun and my mom, does the Japanese I keep using bother you?  If it does, let me know.)

After the calligraphy we moved on to various museums within Inuyama.  We saw several things, like this float that would have been pulled and pushed by people.  It was three floors high and would have been wheeled around to festivals.  The bottom would have been full of musicians, and the top floor had several marionette-style puppets.  In the middle, hidden by a curtain, would have been the puppet operators.  Our guide explained that there weren’t any steering wheels, so when they wanted to turn the cart, people would have just had to push really hard on one side or the other.

After that we saw a demonstration of the puppets.  Basically four guys are standing under the curtain, pulling different strings and levers, and making the puppet do each of its motions.  This one was some alcohol sprite or something like that.  So he drinks sake, walks around, has a fan he can open and close, and his face turns red when he gets drunk. I took a video, but it doesn't seem to work and I'm too lazy to put it up on YouTube.

They let us give it a go, and it would have been hard to coordinate all those movements!

Another thing we saw in the museum that I thought was pretty cool was these tea-serving puppets.  They were wind-up toys where you could put a cup of tea on their little plate and they’d roll forward and offer it to the guest.  Keep in mind that this is from the Edo period. 

We stuck our heads in a place where the reenactors had been hanging out.  Inside there was a bunch of samurai armor.  They let us try on one paper kabuto hat. 

戦う顔！tatakau kao (fighting face!)

After that we went to Inuyama castle.  It’s apparently the oldest castle in Japan, and still has all of its original foundation and stuff.  It’s not a world heritage site yet, but our tour guide made it sound like they were working on it.   Outside there was a shrine, but we didn’t have time to really stop there and figure out shrine procedure. 

It’s hard to see from this picture, but the stairs are really steep.  It’s to keep attackers from making their way up into the castle. 

Also, as you can kind-of see in this model of the structure, there aren’t nails holding together the foundation.  Instead, everything’s notched together, like lincoln logs.  It gives it flexibility in earthquakes and other kinds of disasters.  Our tour guide pointed out that since it’s still standing, that’s probably a pretty good testament to how well it works.

From the top of the castle there was an amazing view.

Do you see the grey cloudy tall tours behind the small hill in the background?  That’s Nagoya.

Here’s our hotel!

For dinner, we boarded a boat and had dinner!

Then we watched cormorant fishing.  I’d never heard of it before.  When I first read about it in our orientation packet I just assumed that meant we’d watch wild birds swooping around and diving in the water for fish.  Turns out, people actually use the cormorant to fish.

I couldn’t understand the explanation because it was in Japanese, but it looks like the cormorants have ropes around their necks, and the ropes are tied to the prow of the fishing boat.  The cormorants dive in the water for fish, and then the fisherman pulls them up onto the boat, squeezes their necks, and they cough up the fish. 
It seems kind-of cruel to me, to be honest.  I think this is the part the guy was explaining away in Japanese, so I don’t know whether it actually hurts them or not.  I know they feed the birds pretty well after they use them to catch fish.  A woman at the tourist shop next to the river gave us all free copies of a manga about cormorant fishing.  Maybe when my Japanese is better I’ll be able to figure out what the deal is. It was kind of a weird experience, to be honest.

After that we got a nice view of Inuyama Castle at night.

With that I’ll leave you all for now.
おやすみ！oyasumi! (good night!)