Listen to the Rain

I was very conflicted over which icon to pick for this post but eventually went with Hiroshima.

ed.mcnamara13 recently went on a two-week trip to Japan, and I got a text from him a couple weeks ago asking me my address. After I told him, I got a picture of a book he had found while on his trip, and a few days ago I got a package in the mail!:


The only thing I knew was coming in advance was the children's book, which is called カービィのひとり時間 kābi no hitori jikan, "Kirby's Time Alone." I haven't read that much of it, because the time when I tried to read it to Laila she really wasn't into it, but the beginning is about how Kirby likes to go off by himself to practice drawing. Maybe I can draw Laila in by emphasizing that he's drawing an apple, since she's currently super obsessed with apples. As long as I have an extra apple to give to her after since otherwise she'll be extremely angry. She's getting to the stage where she'll throw tantrums if she doesn't get her way, but wanting to eat an apple is a habit we want to encourage.

Everything else was a happy bonus! Hiroshima Prefecture was, in the long ago--昔昔 mukashi mukashi, as they say in Japanese, "once upon a time"--known as 安芸国 Aki no Kuni, "Aki Province." It's not written the same as 秋 aki, "autumn," but it is pronounced the same as it and the maple leaf to this day is the symbol of Hiroshima. If you look up Hiroshima specialties the top result will be okinomiyaki--so much better than the barbarous Kansai style --but also in the top result are もみじ饅頭 momiji manjū, the famous maple-leaf-shaped sweets. That's what's front-and-center there, below the Spy x Family branded chocolate-chip cookie. I ate them by the dozen when I lived there and while you can get manjū in America, you can't get momiji manjū, so this is the most welcome part of the package.

To the left is one of Japan's famous flavored kitkats, also momiji manjū flavored. Front right is a French-style financier cookie made by kaedenoki, a dessert company from Hiroshima. You can see one of their gift boxes here for the same cookie, and they even have Hiroshima-style momiji versions too. Sadly, their website doesnn't have any information about shipping overseas, which means they won't do it, and a reshipping service would be too expensive.

Ha, poking around I found this page about the three Setouchi presents, riffing off the 日本三景 nihon sankei, "The Three Scenic Views" of which the shrine gate in Itsukushima Shrine on Miyajima is one. There's some controversy about this because Hayashi Gahō was clearly biased in favor of coastlines, but the places he picked are legitimately amazing. Maple butter sando cookies and momiji manjū are both delicious, but I don't think I've had Gaba ramen before. It says it has a rich flavor of spicy miso and homemade aromatic oils mixed into flavorful tonkotsu broth, which is just marketing copy for ramen to my mind. Every place in Japan has its own style of ramen--I'm partial to Onomichi ramen, which literally had oil visibly floating on top of the broth--and Gaba Ramen looks local to Hiroshima. I should have tried it while I lived there.

The tea bag I'm not sure about, since it has no text at all.

A lovely care package that I was super happy to receive!

This year, the ceremony in the Peace Park in Hiroshima City to commemorate the atomic bombing took place with only a few people in attendance. The yearly 灯篭流し (tōrō nagashi, "Lantern-floating") event was cancelled. A quiet way to mourn the 75th anniversary yesterday.

There aren't a lot of 被爆者 (hibakusha, "Atomic bombing survivors") left, and some of those left are starting to worry that after their gone, there won't be anyone to pass on their lessons anymore.

Though when I see their calls for America to apologize, I think of the article I read just yesterday about how 60,000 French civilians died in the bombings leading up to D-Day, something no one ever talks about. I think about the hibakusha I met in the Peace Park, who was angry about the very idea of Hiroshima as a city of peace because of Imperial Japan's warmongering. And I think of why some people think America should apologize for the bombing.

There's a tendency in Japan to treat the war as something that just happened to them, rather than something the Empire of Japan deliberately provoked and then committed atrocities that killed tens of millions during. You can see this often in Japanese fiction, too--places like Wutai in Final Fantasy VII, or Hai-Lan in Valkyrie Profile, where they're small and cultured and at the mercy of other nations around them, who often brutally attack them seemingly without provocation. Woe is us, it seems to say. Our tiny nation has suffered so, but we have endured. Why do they hate us?

No more nuclear weapons is a good message. They are too terrible to be used, and at least so far after WWII, that's held true. Whenever I think of the commemorations for the dead, I think of the faded black-and-white picture on my elderly Japanese tutor in Japan's family shrine, of a teenage boy in horn-rimmed glasses, who said that it was of her elder brother who died in the bombing. I think of stories like this one, or what I saw in the 広島平和記念資料館 (Hiroshima Heiwa Kinen Shiryōkan, "The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum"). But I think of that man in the Peace Park's anger when he half-shouted, "It was a military city! A military city!" He at least had reason to be dubious of peace this and peace that and why, exactly, there was a Peace Park in the first place.

世界に平和を広がるように. May peace spread across the entire world.

---

This post's subject is an excerpt from a poem, which in official translation reads:

That autumn
in Hiroshima, where it was said:
'For 75 years nothing will grow,'
new buds sprouted
in the green that came back to life.
Among the charred ruins,
people recovered
their living hopes and courage."

For the last few days, it’s been raining in Hiroshima and the surrounding prefectures. And when I say rain, I’m not just talking about the usual way the rainy season in Japan turns out, where you don’t want to leave your house without an umbrella no matter what the sky looks like and where two foreigners new to the country can get caught in the rain until a kind convenience store owner takes pity on them and gives them an umbrella for free. No, I’m talking about this:


Eighty (Edit: 150) dead, at least. Dozens missing. Millions under an evacuation order. Some places doubled or tripled the average rainfall for the whole month in less than a week. The city of Kure, where I never quite made it to Sushi Tatsu for kaitenzushi, had large parts ordered evacuated (Edit: and is currently mostly cut off from the outside world by landslide debris). The first of the dead, washed away in an overflowing river, was found in Akitakata, a few miles from Chiyoda where I lived. Takehara, where we went three times to the Bamboo Festival and where the anime Tamayura is set, full of muddy water. The Kamogawa in Kyōto, the river that runs through the eastern part of the city and of which I have wonderful memories of strolling along its banks at twilight, has overflowed to the point where the walking paths next to it are completely inundated. Someone I know was nearly killed by a landslide and forced to take shelter in a hospital, after which he went out with emergency crews and rescued twenty people before finally being able to go home thirty hours later.

Chiyoda is in the mountains, so it’s not likely to have much flooding there, but that means landslides are even more of a worry. I went to the Kitahiroshima Town homepage, to the disaster prevention section, and found this as the most recent announcement:

7月7日午後4時に、北広島町全域に発令していた避難勧告を解除しました。

なお、大雨警報は継続しており、河川が増水し、土砂災害の恐れのある状態が続いていますので、引き続き注意してください。

Which reads:

"At 4 p.m. July 7th, the evacuation order for the Kitahiroshima area was rescinded. Still, as alerts of heavy rain continue, the rivers keep rising, and there is great danger of landslides, exercise caution."

So that’s good, relatively! They’re not in as much danger as I feared, and one of our old students posted a picture from her backyard and the only problem visible is the creek slightly risen. Another person I know marked himself safe, which is good, and one of the teachers wrote a post about how her condo is fine and the roads are clear, but the nearby grocery store is closed and everything smells of mud. A couple people I still haven’t heard from, but for the moment I’m assuming that it’s because they don’t post on Facebook very much or aren’t on it at all. I hope so, anyway.

If things had turned out differently, I would have landed in Japan today as part of a two-week vacation, focusing specifically on Hiroshima and western Japan where we lived, and obviously the entire vacation would have been ruined. We wouldn’t want to be in the area drawing on extra resources when there are ongoing rescue efforts and who knows how accessible anywhere we would have wanted to go would be. Not much of a chance of Sandankyō being open and accessible after all that rain, I think, and who knows if the train from Hiroshima to Izumo is running. The Kamogawa is flooded, Arashiyama is under an evacuation order. The coast of the Setonaikai is covered in mud from landslides and standing water. We would have just gotten in the way.

All of this is just awful.

Edit: Looks like even getting to Hiroshima would have been hard:

"No bullet trains were running west of Shin-Osaka Station, about 17 minutes away, and West Japan Railway Co. officials said they had no idea when they might start up again."
Source: Tourists visiting western Japan stranded amid flood warnings and canceled trains.

Edit Edit: As I thought, Sandankyō is closed until the 11th. The water isn't on in Onomichi, and the city website is filled with notices about where to go to get water, like this one in easy Japanese. Hiroshima City is closer to back to normal, but there's still not much extra food in the groceries and convenience stores. I guess it's better that I'm still in America.

​
This weekend is the date of two of my favorite festivals in Hiroshima--Tōkasan in Hiroshima City and Mibu no Hanadaue in Chiyoda (とうかさん and 壬生の花田植, respectively). There's video of Mibu no Hanadaue here

It's really making me miss Japan. We went to both festivals all three years we lived in Hiroshima, because while we sometimes had a hard time knowing that any particular event was occurring, Tōkasan was the talk of the town for months, and our students invited us to Mibu no Hanadaue the first year we lived there. And now that social media is so big in disseminating information, I follow a bunch of Facebook pages like 北広島ほっと情報 (Kitahiroshima Town Hot News Updates) or the Tōkasan page. That means I have a constant stream of updates on festivals I went to, festivals I knew about but never got the chance to attend, and festivals I've never heard of but really wish I had. Plus pictures, of course. Get Hiroshima, the gaijin-run local events news source, posted this picture of Mibu no Hanadaue.


Source.
Re: my subject line, today's weather in Chiyoda was sunny and clear, with a 0% chance of precipitation.

Also, last night I installed Heroes of the Storm after my attempts to play an AI-enabled DotA Allstars in Warcraft III did not go well. It's the only map I've ever found that crashed WCIII, and some searching found that the map has problems with certain heroes' abilities. There's no way I'm playing DotA on Battle.net. Those days are done. I played DotA games for thousands of hours when I was a university student and have no desire to go back to the world of racist insults and people dropping the instance the other team scores first blood against them.

HotS seems to solve a lot of my problems with MOBA games. There's no items, so there's no need to memorize item combinations. There's no gold, so last-hitting isn't a thing. XP is team-wide, so jungling and people demanding solo mid don't exist. Also, it's free just like the original DotA Allstars was (WCIII was a sunk cost at that point), so there's no harm in trying it out. And you can play against AI so schoolpsychnerd might try it out with me and see if she likes it.

I don't know how long I'll stick with it, but I'm glad I tried it out. It's much more fun than I thought it would be.

One benefit of staying in a ryokan is that you get both dinner and breakfast, so after sleeping in almost until the last minute, I was awakened by schoolpsychnerd with exactly enough time to make it to breakfast after a quick shower. And such a breakfast:



We had to eat a bit quickly in order to make the ferry, and originally I thought we were going to miss the shuttle from the ryokan to the port and would have to walk. What was I thinking? This is Glorious Nippon, after all. They held the bus for us, loaded our luggage into it while we paid for the room, and then drove us down in time to catch the 8:25 ferry and the street car that was just leaving after that.

We didn't try to make the 9:40 bus after arriving at 9:35, so we popped into a 7-11 to withdraw cash and get snacks--I got a melon pan, om nom nom--and then up to the bus center, where we bought tickets and asked for the proper platform to board the bus. I thought it was eight, but I was misremembering. It was nine, like it's always been.

Also, schoolpsychnerd accidentally bought us children's tickets instead of adult tickets and we were worried for a moment, but we were being silly. This is Japan, and the ticket counter exchanged them for free. They were actually the same price, so I'm not sure why the 北部 line even offers separate tickets.

On the bus, we learned that Pokemon Go had finally gone live in Japan, causing a frantic burst of activity as tropicanaomega captured every unclaimed gym in sight.

And then, we arrived in Chiyoda.



Kaminaka-san, Hattori-san, and Sunada-san were all waiting to meet us at the bus center, and after a round of hugs (hugs! In Japan!) we started on our short tour. First we went to the Geihoku Cultural Center, new since we lived here, that had exhibits about local folk crafts like weaving and rice growing, about kagura performance, and about the festival of Mibu no Hanadaue. Then we went to Mibu itself, walking down the shōtengai where the festival takes place and ending at Mibu Jinja, where we went for hatsumōde our last year in Japan.



After that, we drove up to a viewpoint on top of a hill, and after a short walking path, we found our way to 壬生城跡 (Mibu shiroato, "the ruins of Mibu Castle"). I didn't see anything that looked remotely like a castle had ever been there, but there was a spectacular view:



After that, we went to look at our old house, still pretty nice looking and still sitting next to the abandoned twin house next to it, and and then off to Chiyoda High School! Unfortunately, due to the Japanese policy of transferring teachers after only a few years, very few of the people that schoolpsychnerd taught with were still there. There were a couple, though. Umeki-sensei, who teaches math, and Nishihara-sensei, who teaches science, and the school nurse were all there. We also ran into Koyama-san, mother of Kazu, who I wrote about in this post and who is now a high school student. We didn't talk for very long because Kaminaka-san had set us a schedule, but we looked around for a bit in the school and then continued on to the Yae-sogo Communtiy Center for lunch, where we were met by Nakamura-san, the other Hattori-san, and Bōno-san.

Lunch was amazing. They had remembered I liked sake a lot and brought two small bottles for me, one of local sake from Chiyoda and one from Saijō, where the sake festival is held every year in late August. We had conbini bentō and okonomiyaki, as well as dessert jello from somewhere. I got a grape and aloe jelly that tasted exactly like the drinks I used to get from vending machines. We chatted, and I did a lot of translating to and from Japanese, and there were only a couple times where I just brought the conversation to a halt because I couldn't think of how to express an idea. It was amazing. Why did we leave?

Oh yes. So schoolpsychnerd could go to school and fulfill her dreams. It's a good reason! And yet, when I'm here, walking around Chiyoda, speaking in Japanese in a way that I was very uncomfortable doing when I lived here the first time...

If I had moved here before knowing as much Japanese as I know now, I'd be conversationally fluent. But, well, there's nothing to do about that now. I just have to keep trying and keep studying.



And we will be back, someday. Sooner than five years.

After a three-hour meal, we had to catch the bus back to Hiroshima, so we took the taxi Kaminaka-San had chartered and packed away the hand-made pottery pieces he had made for each member of our group, including aaron.hosek, who wasn't there due to having not been in Hiroshima with us, and we got on the highway bus and started the trip back. After the trip, we walked to our hotel--not Hotel Active, sadly, because there was a weekend price spike that made it not worth staying in--but in Toyoko Inn on Heiwa-Ōdōri, which was further but not significantly so. We were scheduled to meet some old friends from our Japan days, who happened to all be here at the same time in a weird serendipity, and after we checked in that's what we set out to do, though tropicanaomega and tastee_wheat stayed behind because they were still incredibly full from lunch.

The tabe・nomihōdai was at Sōgo, not Mitsukoshi like we originally expected it would be, so it took a bit longer to get there than we thought it would. Not too long, though, and once we made our way through Sōgo to the special beer garden elevator and went up, we had a couple hours of drinks and food with friends. The food wasn't that great, but I got some nice use out of the bottle of sake that it didn't seem like anyone else was drinking from, and a lovely time talking to people I hadn't seen in years. And some Japanese practice with alwaysgenki_alwayshappy, though I think because of the beer, she forgot that I'm not that great and just launched into full native speed and I followed along as best as I could.

At ten they threw everyone out. Some people were going on to a bar called Koba and originally I was planning on joining them, but on the walk there I started getting more and more twitchy in a way that told me that it was time to go back to the hotel. So I said my goodbyes, walked back to the hotel with a friend, and read until schoolpsychnerd came back and then went to bed.

Steps taken: 14050.

Note: If you're interested in more about Chiyoda, I did a whole blog series about it here.

We woke up at 7:10 today, and so hopefully this is the last time I have to make note of our wake up time. Maybe it's because we're in Hiroshima, and like I said, it feels like home. Maybe it's the drinks we had before we went to bed calming us down enough that we were able to sleep through. Maybe it's just that all that walking and travel tired us out--I know that schoolpsychnerd basically fell asleep the instant her head hit the pillow, before I had gotten more than a few words into the last writing session on yesterday's blog post.

Or maybe it's because Hotel Active has the most effective blackout curtains I've ever seen. Seriously, it's like being in an oubliette.

Sakura Hotel was a good price, especially for Tokyo lodgings, and double especially after we got that discount. ¥9300 a night. And ¥350 for all-you-can-eat coffee, tea, toast, and soup is nice too. But, Hotel Active cost us ¥8900 a night, breakfast is also all you can eat, it's included in the price, and it's a buffet that looks like this:



This is actually my second plate of food. They have a full buffet with Western and Japanese breakfast, so I absolutely loaded myself to take advantage of it. schoolpsychnerd and I still hadn't showered, so we went back to do that and everyone lounged around for an hour or so until we were all ready to face the day.

We headed out toward the Peace Park, walking down the covered Hondōri for all of its length and watching the shops start to prepare to open. When we got to the Peace Park, the sun was shining brightly and it was incredibly hot and humid, with absolutely no sign of the storms that were supposed to show up later. Just another Japanese summer.

I don't really like visiting the Peace Memorial Museum. It's not the sort of thing that one likes. I keep going because it's important, and because the museum does a great job of focusing on the horrors of the bombing while not falling to the Japanese tendency to cast themselves as the victims who always suffer at others' hands. The displays admit that Japan invaded Manchuria, for example, which is more than some of their history books do. But of course, there were innocent victims:



We went through the museum in silence, and when we were done and people had bought souvenirs, mostly made of recycled paper from the cranes sent in from around the world, we headed out to lunch. Our original choice had a line waiting in the sun, so we walked back down Hondōri to Okonomimura, a multi-story bundling stuffed full of okonomiyaki restaurants. It's not somewhere we often went when we lived here, but that's because our neighborhood had an okonomiyaki restaurant run out of someone's house, so we wanted different food when we came into the city. Here, though, I figured that there'd be at least one restaurant in there that didn't have a line, and I was right. We went to Chichan and stuffed ourselves with okonomiyaki (I got negiyaki, which leaves out the noodles), and then split apart.

One friend went off to Hiroshima-jō to look at the grounds and castle, and tropicanaomega went back to the hotel. xoDrVenture, tastee_wheat, and I wanted dessert, so we walked over to the Polar Bear Cafe for gelato. ¥380 for a double, murasaki imo and rum raisin. tastee_wheat ordered a double after we did but before the workers put any ice cream on ours, so she got a giant stack of matcha and mango. We all ate our gelato together, I surprised a pair of obāchans with how huge I am, and then we went our separate ways.

schoolpsychnerd and I headed back out to Hondōri, now looking more like I remember:



...and did some shopping. Now that I overhauled my personal style and would actually wear some of the clothes here, I figured that I should look and see if I found anything I liked. And I did. A black button-down shirt with wine-red cuffs but a black collar, so I don't look like a total asshole, and an incredibly pretentious shirt with white birds and vines and swirls of mist that says: "We are born, so to speak, twice. Once into existence, and once into life." It's perfect for me.

We went up and down Hondōri, into Parco and Sunmall, up to the new Andersen's location and down to Bookoff, where I got another Neko Atsume souvenir and schoolpsychnerd got a Sailor Moon brooch charm. This was a three hours of shopping, and by this point it was 5:30 and we needed to use the laundry machines at Hotel Active, so as it started to rain, we walked back to the hotel.

Unfortunately, all the laundry machines were full, so we took showers to wash the Japanese humidity off while we waited. Eventually schoolpsychnerd went down to physically wait at the machines while I headed over to the cultural center to check and see if the kagura performance we had gotten a flier for was still on, since it said that it might be canceled due to storms and there was a thunderstorm outside. When I got there, though, the rain had basically died, there were red banners placed all outside the building, and:



Kagura is one of schoolpsychnerd's and my favorite memories of Hiroshima. It's an old art form that's not super common in the rest of the country anymore, though it used to be a thousand years ago when kagura was a ritual form used at shrines--it literally means "god music." Nowadays it's mostly for entertainment (though it still occurs in its original capacity in the Imperial household), and in Hiroshima especially there are kagura performances at most major festivals.

In another bit of serendipity, the specific show they performed tonight was Akkoden, which along with its sequel Sesshoseki was performed almost every time there was an event with kagura in Chiyoda. To happen to be here on a Wednesday, the night of the kagura performances, and then to have the specific performance be this one...

Also, at the end, they invited people up to the stage to take picture with the actors and, well:



One other person came with us, and after the performance let out and we had gone out to dinner at an Indian restaurant, we took stock of the situation. It turned out most people wanted to stay in for the night, so our friend went back to the hotel and schoolpsychnerd and I went to check out a bar we knew. Unfortunately, it had closed in the meantime and been replaced by one with a ¥500 table charge, so we headed back up Nakimi-dōri toward the hotel and stopped in at a sake bar called いいお酒 一彩 (ii osake issai).

That turned out to be a great idea. It was small, seating maybe a dozen people, with smooth jazz playing on a low volume, and other than us there was no one in there but a single salaryman in the corner. The bartender asked us if we knew Japanese, and then handed us a menu and asked if we wanted oolong tea or beer as our free drink. We both picked tea and looked at the menu before asking the bartender for his recommendation--I couldn't read most of it, and even what I could read didn't mean anything to me because while I like sake a lot, I don't know that much about it.

He gave us a very dry sake that wasn't super strong, at least in taste. It got a bit much toward the end of the glass, but it was delightful before then, and schoolpsychnerd and I drank our sake, ate our complementary fried tofu, listened to the music, and chatted. When our glass was done, we went back to the hotel, waited for our laundry to finish--it took close to five hours for a single load; good thing it was free--and then went to bed.

Steps taken: 21042

Yay! Regression to the mean!

Okay, that's being flippant, but after two weeks of blah posts it's nice to have some good news to report for once. And it's especially nice since I had to get over my instinctual revulsion at the news of anything that has lentils in it. I don't know why I do that, since I like lentils a lot and I've never had anything containing them that I didn't like, but it seems like every single time the same thing happens. In fact, I wrote about this exact same problem in the dalcha post, which also had lentils and which I was also initially leery about.. I didn't like dalcha as much as I liked dhansak, and I'll try to unpack that as we continue.
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Well, I mentioned the zoo in my last entry, so I might as well explain what I was doing there.

Like I said, we went there with the 大川s (that's "Ōkawa" for people who don't speak moon language). Mrs. 大川 is a P.E. teacher at Chiyoda High School with schoolpsychnerd. Her husband is also a teacher, as it turned out, though of Japanese. Anyway, we went to the Asa Zoo, which is Hiroshima's somewhat-small zoo. It was raining the whole day, but I bought new umbrellas for schoolpsychnerd and I, so it wasn't too bad. The main interesting part was talking to the 大川s' children. They had three: Ryoutarou, Hinata, and Kanata. Respectively, 8 years old, 5 years old, and 3 years old. Kanata obviously didn't say much, But both Ryou-chan and Hina-chan were able to talk to me, and I to them, with varying degrees of success. They're pretty good at English for their age--Ryou-chan could ask us our names, how old we are, our favorite colors and fruits, count to a hundred and tell us all those answers himself, and while Hina-chan lagged a bit behind, she was still better than some of the students I taught.

We did feel a bit bad, because they sprung a dinner on us without warning (schoolpsychnerd was under the impression that it was just going to be a visit to the zoo), which meant we went to their house without a house gift, and what's worse, they gave us one after making us dinner and buying a bottle of booze for me. That's massive 義理 we owe towards them, then, and I'm not sure we have a chance to repay it, since 大川さん is being transferred this year. Though we have her e-mail, so hopefully we are actually able to invite them over for dinner. We told them we'd make Mexican food for them. It's a popular choice, since it's not nearly as common in Japan as it is in America.

They made 手巻 for dinner, which, now that we've seen how it's made, we can buy supplies for to make ourselves pretty easily. The only difficult might be finding sashimi-grade fish in the States, since there's no standard for what exactly constitutes "sashimi-grade," but I'm sure we can figure it out. The meal also made me realize why the amount of water we're supposed to add to rice is so high. When it's just rice in a bowl I prefer it to be less glutinous, so to speak, but when it's part of 手巻 the stickiness really helps things out.

Someday I'm going to write a whole entry in Japanese, just to see if I can. I'm not sure if I'll make it private or not, or whether it matters in the end.

Maybe listening to 島唄 wasn't the best idea.

Note: This is not about that coffeehouse we found in Hiroshima City.

schoolpsychnerd and I are currently plagued. Well, it's mostly better now, but we still have residual coughs and tiredness. It's good that Chiharu wasn't able to come for dinner, because we probably would have given her the plague too. On the other hand, we missed the enkai that Takamiya had. And both of us were invited, since they wanted to meet me. (T_T) Oh well, maybe next time.

Last weekend, we went to a tea ceremony at Shukkeien garden. They have them every month, and one of our students from our adult eikaiwa does tea ceremony as a hobby. She wasn't at this ceremony, but because of it, she gave us her tickets to attend, so we went.

It was a lot like the ceremonies I've been to before that the tea ceremony club at Chiyoda High School put on, though obviously more elaborate. The main difference was that there was one person whose entire job was explaining how the tea was prepared, what the implements being used were, and so on. All in Japanese, though I did understand a few bits. They put a black bean and an umeboshi in the tea, which meant that the taste at the bottom of the cup was excellent. The sweet beforehand was quite nice too, though we were apparently supposed to bring our own paper to put it on (at Chiyoda and the various tea we've had at temples, they provided it), though fortunately the woman next to us noticed that we didn't have any and gave us some extras from the bag she had.

The most memorable parts for me were, sadly, not really related to the actual ceremony. We were seated in rows around in the room, on strips of red cloth laid over tatami mats. The servers went from left to right, giving each person tea and moving on to the next person. For the second cup of tea, the server skipped the woman next to me and served me first, and didn't noticed until one of the other servers pointed it out. This led to a problem--he had broken the order, but he couldn't take my tea back, so after some profuse apologies he withdrew and the other server gave her a cup. It did also mean that I got to say the traditional line of お先にいただきます (osaki ni itadakimasu, literally, "I receive before [you]") to someone who wasn't schoolpsychnerd.

The other memorable part was sitting seiza. One thing I did learn, based on looking at the feet of the people in front of us, is that we're doing it wrong. When Japanese people sit seiza, they have their ankles turned out so their legs make a short triangle. When I do it, I tend to just kneel down and flatten the front of my legs and feet out against the floor. This leads to the neeed to suffle around and makes my legs fall asleep after not too long, which obviously isn't advisable. This time, I ended up shuffling after 10 minutes, with numb legs after 30 and with pins and needles after 50. Though on the other hand, I did manage to sit seiza for nearly an hour, which is an accomplishment all its own, I guess.

Sickness is back now, and I'm getting a bit too tired to write. I may have more about the three days in the city in my next entry.

So last weekend was Suzugamine's bounenkai (忘年会, "year-forgetting gathering"), and they really went all-out. It was held at a ritzy hotel in Hiroshima down by the beach (with its own attached minimall, restaurant, reflecting pool inside with koi it in, the works) and a troupe of kagura performers came out from Shimane-ken (the next prefecture over) to perform dinner theater for us. After the beginning part, where we received candy from a guy dressed as an oni (and where I got my own personal handful of candy), the performers came out and started to do a performance of Yamata no Orochi (if you've played Okami, you don't need to click that link). This is the most popular kagura play of all, but I had never seen it performed before because it's quite complex to stage. Each of the heads is played by a separate actor, and there's a 15-20 minute sequence that involves them all twining in and around each other to make interesting shapes. It was really neat, and probably the best part of dinner as all the people at my table couldn't speak English and the range of topics we could talk about in Japanese was a bit limited. I did get asked if I ate sashimi, which was a bit odd considering that they had just seen me eat a big plate of it. I assume they were just trying to make conversation and picking a topic they figured I would actually understand.

Also, the main course was kobe beef, so that was cool.

One thing I've noticed that's different from Western European/North American countries here is that people's names have immediately obvious meanings. For example, there are people named things like Honor and Beauty (Masami), A Thousand Pictures of Beauty (Chiemi), A Thousand Springs (Chiharu), Second Son (Jiro), Summer's Child (Natsuko), Courage (Yuuki), Great Protector (Daisuke) and so on. Last names include Mountaintop (Yamasaki), Base of the Mountain (Yamamoto), Pond and Rice Field (Ikeda), Bamboo Field (Takeda), Main Rice Field (Honda), Eastern Mountain (Higashiyama), Western Village (Nishimura), and so on. These mostly came about the same way English family name for commoners did. As you can see, they picked some nearby notable geological feature or landmark. I just find it interesting because if you tried to do something similar in America, most people would think the name was ridiculous (with a few notable exceptions, like "Autumn"), even most of our names do have meaning, just not in English.

Random thoughts.

Yesterday, I went to dinner at Lal’s (an Indian restaurant) in the city like I usually do on Wednesdays. schoolpsychnerd teaches the children’s class in Chiyoda on Wednesdays and can’t be around to pick me up from the station, so rather than walk home, I stay a little later and eat in the city. Anyway, this time, I went in right as they were opening and sat down. The server came over, gave me the special speed menu, then put a hand on it again and asked, "’いつもでいいですか?" Itsumo de ii desu ka?, or roughly, "Is the usual okay?" I said it was, and had dinner a few minutes later. It's nice to be recognized.

One of my students tried to kiss me yesterday. Fortunately, it was a joke.

Here's the story. I gave them a speaking test yesterday, and when it was done, there was only 10 minutes of class left, so I gave them free time. So they said, "Thank you!" and then they said "I love you!" and then one girl said "kiss me!" to which I rolled my eyes and responded with "No." I thought that was the end, until a group of them tried to get me to take my hair out of the ponytail. I managed to hold them off by trying to get them to ask me in English, but Hamasaki-san (the girl who introduced herself as Hamasaki Ayumi) ran up to try to show me what they wanted and reached for my hair. While fending her off, I turned a bit and ended up with my face a few inches away from her, after which she said, "Kiss me." They're clearly reading too much shoujo manga.

I finally took my hair down for a bit after they asked in English. They asked me to do it again, and I told them that I might do it next time if they were quiet and listened. We'll see if that actually works. I suspect it won't, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong.

Tomorrow the school is going to a performance of 鶴姫伝説 Tsuru-hime Densetsu, or "Legend of the Crane Princess." I think I get to go as well, but my only confirmation is an offhand comment from one of the teachers I tutor and a note that there's no morning meeting tomorrow, so I'd better check. Hopefully I'll be able to follow the story.

Next entry: I tell you some of Suzugamine's rules.

So, last week I missed basically everything that happened on the internets because my parents were in town. If you don't remember my Kyōto entry, then I suggest you reference it again because we went all the same places. :-p The only difference was that this time, it was hot and humid instead of cold, and we walked everywhere.

After Kyōto, we made a brief stop in Himeji to see Himeji-jō, which was tragically cut short when my mother twisted her ankle and fainted (probably from a combination of shock, the heat and dehydration. One roll for breakfast and ice cream for lunch does not constitute a balanced diet no matter how healthy your dinner is, Mom!). I ended up running up 6 or 7 flights of stairs to get a guard and explain the situation, and as a minor benefit I will never forget the word for "to faint, collapse" now. She was okay--it was only twisted, not sprained or broken--but we cut our visit short and headed home to get some rest schoolpsychnerd and I are probably going to take a day trip and go back in September when we have a 5-day weekend. It's only 1.5 hours or so by shinkansen from Hiroshima, so that's easily doable in a day (if expensive).

The day after that we rested to give my mother's ankle time to heal, and on Friday we went to Hirata-san's (our Japanese-tutor) house for lunch. Before lunch, her husband, who is a Buddhist priest, showed us around the temple and demonstrated a sutra for us, which was really neat. He has a good chanting voice--it sounded a bit like throat-singing, if you've ever heard that. The meal was quite good, there was much exchanging of omiyage, and then we went off to Miyajima, where we spent the night in a ryokan. Not a small one--those are all super expensive, and would have been booked anyway--but it was still neat. The food was delicious, and it was modernized enough to have air conditioning, which made sleeping on a futon not so bad.

The next day we looked around Miyajima (note that despite the wikipedia article title, all the signs to get there say "Miyajima," even in Japanese). We didn't actually go to the shrine, partially because people had shrine fatigue after Kyōto , but we did climb Mt. Misen. My father and I did it the hard way, and schoolpsychnerd and my mother took the ropeway up. I didn't feel especially holy afterwards, though. 95% humidity meant I felt more just hot and sticky. After riding down the mountain the easy way, we looked around town for a bit (and schoolpsychnerd and I had a delicious lunch of anago, the local specialty), we went back to Chiyoda.

Then on Sunday, they looked around Hiroshima, and on Monday they headed home. schoolpsychnerd and I were going to stay in the city afterwards, but we were incredibly tired so we just went home.

Tomorrow is the anniversary of the bombing, and I think I'm going to the ceremony. There's going to be statements by hibakusha with accompanying English translation, which will be really neat to hear. The actual remembrance is too early for me (and the candles on the river are probably too late), but I can go for the statements at least.

I didn't actually do any work yesterday, but I went in to the city to get my schedule.

My "joushikousei" tag will probably be getting more use from here on out, because the Lang Education Center is assigning me to be the full-time ALT at Suzugamine Girls' High School in Nishi-ku, Hiroshima. It's team teaching (i.e., assisting a Japanese English teacher with their class), so that takes away the lesson planning worries--I can still help with lessons, but I don't have to plan everything all by myself anymore. I also get paid a better salary, including all the holidays that Suzugamine gets, like a month off in the summer.

Bad news: I have to get up at 6 a.m. every morning or earlier, take an hour busride into the city and then a half-hour streetcar ride to the school. Also, I sometimes have to teach on Saturdays and late on Thursday nights (well, to 8 p.m., but then I have to take the bus home).

Good news: I can sleep on the bus and Lang is giving me a transportation stipend. The schedule says "every other Saturday," but a lot of them seem to be days off.

It seems like it'll go well! The person before me finished out their contract; the reason I'm getting the job is because they moved back to their home country. And being in a Japanese teachers' office will give me more chances to practice Japanese. All in all, it seems like it'll go well. I hope it does.