Tarui Matsuri

Wow, I’m a little behind! Sorry guys.  Let’s see, first a response to comments:

Andrea, welcome aboard!  It’s fun to hear from you, and I hope you’re doing well too.  As for the sink/bathroom configuration, I’m pretty sure it just depends on how the house was built.  But my thinking is that Japanese houses are pretty small by and large.  The bath set up is usually like this:  A bathtub, with an open space next to it with a shower head and a stool for rinsing off, since the practice here is to clean your body, and then get in the bath to soak, as opposed to cleaning yourself in the bath.  I imagine having more than one bath per house would require a pretty large house.  In my host family’s house, there’s the bath and the toilet my host parents use downstairs (the two aren’t connected, they have separate rooms, and the shower is actually connected to the laundry room which makes sense).  My bedroom is upstairs so they told me the upstairs sink and toilet were mine to use. 
What was your situation like in France? Now I’m curious to hear more about it.

Mom, I thought the sweets were a bit too sweet.  I needed a nice bitter cup of green tea to cut the sweetness.  Also the chicken wasn’t all the way raw.  It had been cooked most of the way through.

Lily, I’ve been lucky so far and had great weather for all of my trips.  I’ve never actually been to a spa so I can’t make that comparison, but it seems like it’s probably similar.  It probably depends on the onsen if there’s places to get massages and that kind of stuff.  That’d be great though, mannn.  I could use a shoulder massage like nothing else in the world.

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I feel like I’ve been doing nothing but going to festivals lately!  Part of that is thanks to my class. My fieldwork research methods professor studies festivals, particularly the ways gender roles in festivals are changing.  As a result, to kind of practice field work he’s invited us on a lot of field trips to festivals.
The first of these was the Imaike festival-turned-dinner-outing that I talked about before.

Two weekends ago we went to a town called Tarui, in Gifu prefecture, for the Tarui Taiko Matsuri, or Drum Festival.

The festival was held on the grounds of a local preschool in Tarui, this pretty small town.  I don’t think the place itself was very well known, and it’s a pretty rural area.  Other Japanese people we talked to about our trip hadn’t heard of it.

Our professor wouldn’t tell us anything about the festival before we got there.  He told us anything we’d want to know we’d have to ask the people around us.  Of course, that meant asking them in Japanese!

Well here’s what we managed to find out:
I’m not sure which deity this festival is for, but it’s asking for rain.  The drums represent thunder and the puffy paper things people are holding that look like pompoms on sticks represent clouds.  Each of those drums that the men are playing weigh, at their heaviest, 60 kg. 

The performers have the drums tied to them, and carry them while drumming and doing a dance, too.

I took some videos:

Me and Tiffany, a girl in my class, by one of the drums after the festival itself ended.

We didn't get to the bottom of all of the symbols.  For example, some of the people asked what the pink flowers on people's hats represented and I'm still not exactly sure.

After the festival all the drums get taken back to their "homes", in shrines around the town.  We got to follow one back where the people play it one more time, and then put it away for the year.

But before they put it up, they let a couple of us give it a try.  Since this is a men's festival, women aren't technically supposed to touch the drums, I don't think.  But they let ladies give it a try.  I think I ended up in an awkward in between space as a lady in jeans and a t-shirt with short hair.  They didn't offer me a chance when the guys were going and they ignored me when they let a girl try it.  D:

 But here's Hoan, one of the guys in my class, getting strapped onto the drum.

And picking it up and playing it.

I think it's a balance and weight distribution thing more than anything.  The guys said the drum itself didn't feel that incredibly heavy.

On the way back to the train station, we realized just how in the country we were. 

Some scarecrows in some rice fields!  You can see pretty clearly in these pictures the way agriculture and industry butt up directly next to each other.  Japan doesn't go from city to countryside the way the US does.  You'll be on the train in the city for five minutes and then you'll see houses, fields, more houses, and a bunch of stores and factories and stuff.  And then there will be a bunch of houses, but interspersed every few streets will be more little pockets of fields.  As Shaun put it on her blog "Zoning must work differently here."

Anyway it was a nice little trip and it was fun to get out to the country a bit more.  This was my first real festival, and it means I got to eat my all time favorite festival food: TAKOYAKI. Yum.

Kanazawa Field Trip

First, response to comments.

Shaun, okay, more thoughts on sociology babble.  We talked about social class on Friday in my Japanese Culture/sociolinguistics class.  Our teacher was asking us about what we can perceive just from a conversation about the weather and we all mentioned social class.  She then asked us how many classes there were in each of our countries.  The Australians were very adamant about there being two: upper and lower.  The Americans got the most fuzzy about the boundaries and talked a lot about upper-middle vs. middle vs. lower middle, along with super-wealthy vs. upper class and working poor vs. like, really really poor.  A lot of people thought we were overthinking it, but I think that really is the way Americans seem to talk about class, particularly the trying to incorporate everyone into the middle class.
Our professor said if you ask the average Japanese person, they'll say Japan doesn't have socioeconomic classes, that everyone's in the same kind of class.  Not sure what conclusions to draw from this, but it's interesting.



To Mom and everyone else worried about the IV, I had other people confirm for me too that that's definitely a much more normal move in Japan, like Shaun was saying.





To Lily and Nancy,  I'm feeling just fine now, thanks for your concern!

Nancy, I'm really having a great time here, the typhoon just overwhelmed me is all!
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This weekend we went on a field trip to Kanazawa!
It’s a traditional style village about a four hour drive from Nagoya.

All 24 of the people from my study abroad program were together on a charter bus.  It was funny because it was the first time we’d been together like that since our four day orientation in Inuyama, when we’d all just gotten to Japan and were jet lagged and didn’t know each other at all.  Suffice to say this time was much more fun!

On the way we stopped at a Buddhist temple, Eiheiji.  I’m not really sure what the significance of this particular temple is, but it’s very large.  I took a few pictures, but mostly of the landscaping in and around the temple. 

I don’t know the significance of anything, so it’s hard to really talk about what we saw.  But there was this huge tatami room near the front that had these really cool painted panels on the ceiling.
There were also lots of monks and monks in training walking around doing... whatever monks do, but we were expressly forbidden to take pictures of them. 

This is where it would have been nice to have taken some Japanese culture, history, religion, etc. type classes before coming here.  Hopefully I’ll know more by the time we get to Kyoto.

We hit the road again, and went to another building to do what our itinerary called “a gold leaf sticking experience”.  Kanazawa is famous for its gold leaf so we got to do this little workshop where we designed and gold-leafed the lid to a little box we got to keep!
IT WAS REALLY HARD.  We had two different thicknesses of tape to mask off areas of the box we didn’t want covered in gold or silver leaf, and then we got glue painted on our boxes, and cut pieces of the sheets of gold and silver leaf to stick down.  Then a coating gets painted over it.  After it’s dry you can take your tape off and see what your design looks like.

The guy running the workshop only gave us 15 minutes to design something!  Other people managed to do some really cool stuff, but I knew that if I tried to do something complicated I’d probably screw it up, so after whining about how I didn’t know what to do for a few minutes I decided to just do something really simple.  The lines are uneven and that bothers me a bit, but when your only tools are tape and you there’s only so much you can do...!

The silver leaf in particular was really difficult to work with.  It just kind-of dissolved if you (I swear) breathed on it the wrong way.  The stuff was set up with a layer of plastic, the leaf, and a layer of thin paper.  Right before you stuck it down to the box you were supposed to remove the paper.  But I swear it static-ed to the plastic and screwed me up! ughhhh.

In the end I was happy with the results though.

After gold leaf we hit the road again, for the ryokan where we were spending the night.  On the way, we drove along the coast!

Arriving at the ryokan meant more crazy ryokan dinners where you start out with more courses than you can possibly eat

This is that broth you see in the background with the raw meat and vegetables that were sitting on the plate on the side now cooking in it.

and then they bring you more

not pictured, the tempura, miso soup, rice, and dessert they brought later.

And of course I had just been sick two days previous so I was still working my stomach up to being able to eat full sized meals again!  Needless to say this was impossible.

(I finally asked my host mom if it’s really possible for anyone can eat all that.  She says Japanese people can do it.  Even though they’re small, they can put away all that food.  They don’t normally do it but if they go to a ryokan it’s apparently chow down time.)

Here’s a picture of our room.  We were in groups of six this time.  I ended up in the room with all the quiet people, which was perfectly fine, they’re all great people, but I ended up going to another room and hanging out and getting to know some of the other people from my program better, which was really really fun!

The ryokan we stayed at had 3 different onsen, public bath/hot spring things.  We only had one night there so we chose to do the Grand Onsen Tour, as I referred to it in my head.  Going to each of the different baths in the evening after dinner.  One was a normal one of the style they had at Inuyama, indoors.  We went there first because we had to wash our bodies and stuff first because you weren’t supposed to do that at the other two, and you had to be clean before getting in the bath.
After that there was another bath where you bathe naked like in a normal bath, and it’s outside, but there’s a roof over your head.  That one was really nice because the air was cool, and the water was really hot, but I didn’t spend that much time there because I actually started getting a little too hot.  I feel like it gets a little hard to breathe sometimes if you’re just sitting in really hot water.

The best one was the totally outdoor bath.  This one wasn’t separated by sex, so everyone was given a little wrap to wear.  It was dark because it was probably like 9:00 at night, so I couldn’t really see the scenery around, but the water and the rocks around it were really pretty.  You could feel the cool fall air, which kept the bath from feeling too hot, and you could really just relax.  It was awesome.  After you got out of the bath and changed back into your yukata and stuff there was cool tea for you, too.  It was wonderful.

The next day we actually went to Kanazawa.  As you can tell, it’s a touristy spot for Japanese people, too.
One complaint I have about my study abroad program is they never quite give us enough time to explore places.  It’s like, an hour here, two hours there (usually only an hour though) and then we’re moving on.  So unfortunately we really only kept to the main streets.

First we all were given admission to this old tea house that had been turned into a museum, and maybe if we’d had some kind of information or a tour or something it would have been more interesting, but I think most of us kinda rushed through it to get onto other stuff.
Along with the gold leaf, Kanazawa’s known for pottery, so I was on a pottery shopping mission.

After walking around the old district of Kanazawa and doing some souvenir shopping, we moved to another part of town and split up to have lunch and explore Kenrokuen, one of Japan’s three most famous gardens. 
It was very pretty, but it was a little disappointing because it’s right at the end of summer, beginning of fall here.  So nothing was flowering and the leaves haven’t changed yet.  We walked by sakura and plum trees and all this stuff and I never would have known if it weren’t for the map.
But I really like the way Japanese gardens use water and bridges and stones along with all the greenery, so it was still cool.

And we also saw this one plant that was just full of butterflies!

It apparently snows a lot in Kanazawa in the winter, and the snow gets really heavy, so a lot of the trees have supports like these attached to them to keep the snow from breaking off the branches in the winter. 

After the garden (and more souvenir shopping) we went to a workshop for making Japanese sweets.  Here are the examples.

I’m not sure entirely what they’re supposed to look like, other than one is a flower, but they were pretty.  There were pictures on the wall of other sweets you could buy, too, and they were really pretty and detailed and colorful.

You started out with balls of anko, or sweet read bean paste, and balls of other colorful stuff, which I think was colored bean paste?  Making the sweets was actually surprisingly easy.  The bean paste was incredibly moldable.  You just patted it flat, wrapped it around the bean paste filling, and closed it up, and then shaped it.  Of course my attempts didn’t turn out nearly as nice as the samples, but the techniques themselves were pretty simple to execute.

Here’s me, Paochu, one of the girls from my program, and Masae, one of my program coordinators with our sweets!

After that we were on the road again for our four hour drive home.

On the way there and on the way back, we stopped a couple times for fifteen minute breaks at service areas.  The Japanese answer to a truck stop is, like most mass-produced Japanese things (i.e. convenience stores), much nicer seeming than the American version.  The bathrooms are clean (!), and there are a bunch of shops and restaurants inside.  We didn’t have time to stop and eat at the restaurants, just buy snacks, but apparently the restaurants are pretty good, too.  Katrina, a girl on my program, said that her host mom took her on a trip and said “Oh we’ve got to stop at this cool place on the way they have good food I’ll have to take you there sometime!” and it was a service area...! 

Mysterious.