"Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A Start"
Winter has gone and Spring has begun pushing it's way into the hills and trees. As I write to you, Nagano city is in the midst of cherry blossom season at the start of Spring, where all of the sakura bloom for only 7 to 10 days here. During that time, Japanese people have hananmi parties (cherry blossom viewing) to celebrate the beauty of their national flower. This quickly becomes an excuse for abundant drinking, and in big cherry blossom cities (Kyoto, Tokyo) drunken Japanese people can be found delirious with sake and huddled together around cherry blossom trees in huge numbers (I have only heard the rumours from those who survived to tell the tale. Nagano City's sakura weekend is likely to start this weekend).
Kyoto
I visited Kyoto with Lianne during my spring holiday at the end of March for what was supposed to be the hanami weekend, but the unpredictable weather this year left temperatures at less than 10 degrees with rain for the first two days. On our first night there, with very little sleep on the bus the night before and a day of walking behind us, I kicked back with another friend in an outside public bath near where we were staying. Staring up at the stars through the steam rising around me, snow began to fall and cooled us from the hot water while we chatted, collecting on the stones and in our hair. That night, it was still snowing in the supposed warmth of southern Japan on the last day of March, and as the snow became heavier we wandered outside to the street to find trees lit up by coloured lights along the boulevard and it felt just like Christmas.
Kyoto was a beautiful city, and after 3 days there I was reluctant to leave. During our time there, Lianne and I visited Ni-jou castle, the home of the Shogun; the Imperial Palace, home of the Emperor; the district of Gion, home of Japanese Geisha culture; and the Daitokuji temple, with it's famous Koto-in Zen Garden.
The interior of the Shogun's Castle was beautifully decorated and designed, and the sliding shoji doors opened up all of the rooms from two whole sides. A leaflet at the door tells you all you need to know about each room - who the shogun would receive there, why the walls were decorated as they were and how ninja could hide behind them to spy on visiting officials - and the corridor down which you are taken announces your progress with it's nightingale floors (the floor boards are fitted onto special hinges that creek with each step, making a sound like morning birds that announce the presence of any would-be assassin). The inside of the Shogun's Castle was comparable in beauty only to the gardens that surround it. A moat and stone wall encircle the entire compound, and some of the most beautiful gardens in Kyoto can be seen all around the castle. The tress are simple and perfectly groomed, and on the north side you can see a pond and water fall with deserted islands of rock and greenery in the center.
Kyoto was the old capital of Japan until it was moved to Tokyo. This was done to remove the growing influence of religeon from government affairs - at that time, Kyoto had become the center for Shinto and Buddhist worship (there are still over 1000 temples and shrines in Kyoto today). As such, Kyoto houses what was once the Emperors Palace. Like many buildings in Japan, despite their vast and well documented history, the Palace is very young (only 150 years old). It was originally an alternative palace for the Emperor to live in while they rebuilt his actual palace that kept getting destoyed (it was all made of wood and they used flames for lighting at night - the rebuilding was not an unusual occurance) but eventually he spent so much time there that it became his official home. The tour of the Empiral Palace helps to give you an idea into the life of the Emperor, as you see each of the rooms and are taken on the same tour that a visitor in the time of the Emperor would have received as they were greeted and shown around the grounds. The Palace is very different to anything that you would find in England; it is made almost entirely of wood, with walls constructed from layered tree bark to keep the heat in during the Winter and out during the Summer. Bamboo trees grow outside the Emperor's bedroom so that bird's would fly into them in the early morning and he would be woken by the sound of bird song. The tour is, however, very impersonal and doesn't let you get as close as I would have like the palace itself. Tours in English only occure twice a day, and entrance to the palace grounds without a tour guide is strictly prohibited.
Gion was the area of Kyoto that became the hub of Geisha culture, and it is still possible to walk around Gion today and see beautiful Japanese courtesans walking to and from bars in the evenings (although this I have also only been told in rumour). My only glimpse was of two maiko, young geigha in training from the age of 15, who performed a dance together at a cherry blossom festival along the bank of the Kamo River that runs near the edge of Gion. The turn out was small because of the cold weather, but it meant that it attracted a more die-hard crowd of Japanese geisha fans.
Gion Corner, a tourist center in the center of the Gion district, offers all sorts of geisha-oriented activities, such as geisha dances and flower arranging, but Lianne and I chose to do a Japanese Tea Ceremony (saddou - the way of tea). The class was taken by two ladies, one of whom had been practicing the tea ceremony for over 40 years. The tea ceremony she taught us was a very informal one that only takes around 10 minutes, but some of the more formal ones take up to 2 hours.
After Kyoto, we took a 20 minute train ride into Osaka city and Lianne and I went our separate ways. I ventured around Osaka by myself for the nine hours I had left before my bus set off for Nagano, and I headed into an area know as Amerika-mura (American Village) to try and buy some clothes. Amerika-mura was the closest to London I have felt since coming to Japan, and it reminded me perfectly of Camden Town. It was cleaner, and felt a lot less dangerous, but the pushy shop owners, the unclear pricing and the presence of foreigners all combined to make me feel right at home. After that, I returned home to Nagano to find the last of the snow melted and the first flowers of the new Spring beginning to show themselves.
Where are the pictures? you ask. Why are there no little blue links? you say. Well sadly, my camera became teh suck on our last day, and I lost all of my pictures. Lianne, however, took enough pictures for about 100 normal tourists and has been kind enough to post them to me on CD - when they arrive, they shall be yours also, so please watch for another post in the next couple of weeks with pictures of all the above.
----------------------------------------------
Schools Out
In mid-March, the school year finished and my third years graduated to move on to High School. The graduation day itself was a very strange one. For weeks all of my students had known that they would be moving on, and most of them had become solemn about leaving their friends and everything they knew behind. When the end of something so big finally comes, it is difficult to believe that three years can be completed in a single day, and all becomes touched with a feeling of "unrealness". As the first of the three ceremonies for the day progressed however, it quickly clear that the Japanese obsession with long ceremonies would ruin any genuine emotion that might be felt. Emotive words from students were shouted with obvious premedition according to the designed schedule, and the singing of the school song and herding of the students had such a strong militaristic feel to it that I wondered who this ceremony was actually for; the students hated it, and I don't think the teachers even cared. Maybe the parents enjoyed it?
Three ceremonies took place that day, the first being the students graduation ceremony. Once completed and the students were led out of the hall to applause (several in tears), then led back in 10 minutes later for the second ceremony, rendering the effect of their leaving slighty moot. This was repeated with the teachers who were leaving to move onto another school at the start of next term; they were applauded down the aisle and out of the hall at the end of the second ceremony to the tune of Auld Lang Syne (they also play this song when any store in Japan is closing and wants you to leave - I felt like I was in the 100 Yen store again trying to buy chocolate before they kicked me out). The last teacher stepped through the door and the music stopped dead, mid-bar, and everyone sat down. The drama of it all made me wonder if they were leaving the school at all and not heading out to war, possibly never to return, but no, there they were, back 10 minutes later for the final ceremony.
All of the information about which teachers were leaving was considered a closely guarded secret, and even other teachers didn't know until the day before the ceremony. I asked why the secrecy was necessary to keep such information from the students and I was told that it prevents them from becoming upset and restless in class before the end of the year. It does also mean, however, that some students find out that their homeroom teacher of 2 years is leaving them and won't be their teacher next year, and they only get 30 minutes at the end of the day to say goodbye.
The third ceremony followed, saying goodbye to our headmaster (the new one reminds me of Dr. Hibbert in the Simpsons with his big belly laugh, he is awesome), and then all was concluded. Less than half an hour later the students had said their goodbyes and gone, but in comparison to the heart felt summer festival that I saw last year, it seemed to ignore the feelings and desires of the students completely. By the time I had returned from lunch, all of the students were gone and the day had ended without me being able to say goodbye. I wandered the school for a while, enjoying the sunshine and the quiet, then returned to my desk and killed time till the end of the school year and my time to go home.
Schools In
The new term started 3 weeks ago and all my new first years arrived from Elementary School. I saw them for the first time at the opening ceremony and they were tiny - I couldn't believe that they were meant to be Junior High School students. I finally finished the round of self-introduction classes with them this afternoon and I already love them - they speak English to me when they see me, they are all well behaved in class, and not one of them has tried to grab my genitals yet (I got groped twice yesterday. I really hate the boys in 3.4 sometimes). Last years first years seem to have moved into the role of second years pretty well, becoming a little bit more confident in themselves, trying to express themselves a little bit more in everything they do and also becoming completely obsessed with sex. Thanks to them, as of last week I can no longer claim that five 13 year old girls haven't ganged together and asked me how big I am, a record I was reluctant to lose. Despite this, I am really happy that I will get to see these students go from their first year here all the way through to graduation in two years time.
Miscellaneous
That is almost all for now, but there are a few things that have happened in the last month that I thought worth mentioning but that don't fit in with the narative above, so here you go:
1. Lunch Ladies
We have school lunch delivered by a local catering company every day. It is left at a central room on the ground floor and a few students from each class collect the lunch, take it back to their classroom, serve it themselves, eat, then clear it all away and return the trays, plates, cultery and containers all back to the original room. All of this is done unsupervised, as teachers are too busy to watch over students sorting out lunch every day. This shows is a level of independant and responsible action that I think would be inconcievable in an English school.
Anyway, my lunch comes into the staff room with that of the other staff members who don't have their own class (the office ladies, the librarian, the school nurse, etc), and at the start of this year I noticed a strange trend - whenever someone is adsent, they disribute the extra food among who ever is there, and from January they almost always gave it to me. I wondered why this was for a long time and considered it a gesture of good will, but then I met the (cute) school librarian in my local supermarket and while we were chatting she told me why; it's because they are worried that I don't eat enough. They found out (some how) that I don't normally eat breakfast and are worried that I don't eat properly, so they are trying to take care of me by always giving me the extra. I don't normally speak to them very much, and I was touched by such a motherly gesture from people that I haven't yet been able to have a proper conversation in Japanese with.
2. Secret English
I think I have mentioned my belief in Secret English on here before - all Japanese people with a basic High School education take a minimum of 6 years English study that forms 1/9th of their entire academic experience, yet most Japanese people can't speak a word until they get really drunk and become confident enough to use it.
Taking the bus to Tokyo to meet Lianne, a beautiful young Japanese girl sat down next to me. She wore a fashionable skirt, black boots and cute glasses, and unable to resist the opportunity, I struck up conversation about 5 minutes into our journey. We were talking for maybe 10 or 15 minutes in Japanese when she tells me that she wants to study abroad at either Surry or Nottingham University, and did I know either of these places? Yes, I told her, but why was she interested in going there? Had she looked at a prospectus or any of the courses? Would she be learning in Japanese? She replied by pulling two prospectuses from her bag, both in English, and showing me what she was thinking of studying. Did she understand them? I asked. The English was incredibly difficult. Yes, she replied, she had been studying English translation for quite a while and was hoping to persue it as a career. 15 minutes we had been talking, all in Japanese. Not a word of English. Un-*******-believable.
We chatted on and off for the next 4 hours in both Japanese and English and exchanged numbers at the end, but I found out early on that she was travelling to Tokyo to visit her boyfriend. You can't have everything.
3. When you thought it couldn't get any better than the bike...
I bought a car - it is a white, Daihatsu Mira and has a 700cc engine. It is actually the smallest car in the world. Pictures to come soon, but here is one that isn't mine to keep you going.
4. Living is easy with eyes closed
A few days before the end of term, I met up with the Chinese lady that works at my school and the Chinese student that she is hired to help. All three of us had dinner together with another friend of hers a few days before, and then on the Sunday we met up to go strawberry picking. It was still the start of March, so temperatures were still dipping below zero in the evenings, but they have tents in which they grow the strawberries during the winter and you are allowed to go round and eat as many as you can before you're sick (which actually turned out to be less than I expected). It was an excellent couple of hours, poncing about in a tent with Andy and two Chinese women, eating strawberries and being scared of bees.
5. A Pefect Memory
As the mornings started to warm up a little in early March, walking to school one morning I saw the most perfect image of my village that I will ever have - an old woman was chasing a chicken across the road with an umbrella. It just doesn't get any better than that.
Kyoto
I visited Kyoto with Lianne during my spring holiday at the end of March for what was supposed to be the hanami weekend, but the unpredictable weather this year left temperatures at less than 10 degrees with rain for the first two days. On our first night there, with very little sleep on the bus the night before and a day of walking behind us, I kicked back with another friend in an outside public bath near where we were staying. Staring up at the stars through the steam rising around me, snow began to fall and cooled us from the hot water while we chatted, collecting on the stones and in our hair. That night, it was still snowing in the supposed warmth of southern Japan on the last day of March, and as the snow became heavier we wandered outside to the street to find trees lit up by coloured lights along the boulevard and it felt just like Christmas.
Kyoto was a beautiful city, and after 3 days there I was reluctant to leave. During our time there, Lianne and I visited Ni-jou castle, the home of the Shogun; the Imperial Palace, home of the Emperor; the district of Gion, home of Japanese Geisha culture; and the Daitokuji temple, with it's famous Koto-in Zen Garden.
The interior of the Shogun's Castle was beautifully decorated and designed, and the sliding shoji doors opened up all of the rooms from two whole sides. A leaflet at the door tells you all you need to know about each room - who the shogun would receive there, why the walls were decorated as they were and how ninja could hide behind them to spy on visiting officials - and the corridor down which you are taken announces your progress with it's nightingale floors (the floor boards are fitted onto special hinges that creek with each step, making a sound like morning birds that announce the presence of any would-be assassin). The inside of the Shogun's Castle was comparable in beauty only to the gardens that surround it. A moat and stone wall encircle the entire compound, and some of the most beautiful gardens in Kyoto can be seen all around the castle. The tress are simple and perfectly groomed, and on the north side you can see a pond and water fall with deserted islands of rock and greenery in the center.
Kyoto was the old capital of Japan until it was moved to Tokyo. This was done to remove the growing influence of religeon from government affairs - at that time, Kyoto had become the center for Shinto and Buddhist worship (there are still over 1000 temples and shrines in Kyoto today). As such, Kyoto houses what was once the Emperors Palace. Like many buildings in Japan, despite their vast and well documented history, the Palace is very young (only 150 years old). It was originally an alternative palace for the Emperor to live in while they rebuilt his actual palace that kept getting destoyed (it was all made of wood and they used flames for lighting at night - the rebuilding was not an unusual occurance) but eventually he spent so much time there that it became his official home. The tour of the Empiral Palace helps to give you an idea into the life of the Emperor, as you see each of the rooms and are taken on the same tour that a visitor in the time of the Emperor would have received as they were greeted and shown around the grounds. The Palace is very different to anything that you would find in England; it is made almost entirely of wood, with walls constructed from layered tree bark to keep the heat in during the Winter and out during the Summer. Bamboo trees grow outside the Emperor's bedroom so that bird's would fly into them in the early morning and he would be woken by the sound of bird song. The tour is, however, very impersonal and doesn't let you get as close as I would have like the palace itself. Tours in English only occure twice a day, and entrance to the palace grounds without a tour guide is strictly prohibited.
Gion was the area of Kyoto that became the hub of Geisha culture, and it is still possible to walk around Gion today and see beautiful Japanese courtesans walking to and from bars in the evenings (although this I have also only been told in rumour). My only glimpse was of two maiko, young geigha in training from the age of 15, who performed a dance together at a cherry blossom festival along the bank of the Kamo River that runs near the edge of Gion. The turn out was small because of the cold weather, but it meant that it attracted a more die-hard crowd of Japanese geisha fans.
Gion Corner, a tourist center in the center of the Gion district, offers all sorts of geisha-oriented activities, such as geisha dances and flower arranging, but Lianne and I chose to do a Japanese Tea Ceremony (saddou - the way of tea). The class was taken by two ladies, one of whom had been practicing the tea ceremony for over 40 years. The tea ceremony she taught us was a very informal one that only takes around 10 minutes, but some of the more formal ones take up to 2 hours.
After Kyoto, we took a 20 minute train ride into Osaka city and Lianne and I went our separate ways. I ventured around Osaka by myself for the nine hours I had left before my bus set off for Nagano, and I headed into an area know as Amerika-mura (American Village) to try and buy some clothes. Amerika-mura was the closest to London I have felt since coming to Japan, and it reminded me perfectly of Camden Town. It was cleaner, and felt a lot less dangerous, but the pushy shop owners, the unclear pricing and the presence of foreigners all combined to make me feel right at home. After that, I returned home to Nagano to find the last of the snow melted and the first flowers of the new Spring beginning to show themselves.
Where are the pictures? you ask. Why are there no little blue links? you say. Well sadly, my camera became teh suck on our last day, and I lost all of my pictures. Lianne, however, took enough pictures for about 100 normal tourists and has been kind enough to post them to me on CD - when they arrive, they shall be yours also, so please watch for another post in the next couple of weeks with pictures of all the above.
----------------------------------------------
Schools Out
In mid-March, the school year finished and my third years graduated to move on to High School. The graduation day itself was a very strange one. For weeks all of my students had known that they would be moving on, and most of them had become solemn about leaving their friends and everything they knew behind. When the end of something so big finally comes, it is difficult to believe that three years can be completed in a single day, and all becomes touched with a feeling of "unrealness". As the first of the three ceremonies for the day progressed however, it quickly clear that the Japanese obsession with long ceremonies would ruin any genuine emotion that might be felt. Emotive words from students were shouted with obvious premedition according to the designed schedule, and the singing of the school song and herding of the students had such a strong militaristic feel to it that I wondered who this ceremony was actually for; the students hated it, and I don't think the teachers even cared. Maybe the parents enjoyed it?
Three ceremonies took place that day, the first being the students graduation ceremony. Once completed and the students were led out of the hall to applause (several in tears), then led back in 10 minutes later for the second ceremony, rendering the effect of their leaving slighty moot. This was repeated with the teachers who were leaving to move onto another school at the start of next term; they were applauded down the aisle and out of the hall at the end of the second ceremony to the tune of Auld Lang Syne (they also play this song when any store in Japan is closing and wants you to leave - I felt like I was in the 100 Yen store again trying to buy chocolate before they kicked me out). The last teacher stepped through the door and the music stopped dead, mid-bar, and everyone sat down. The drama of it all made me wonder if they were leaving the school at all and not heading out to war, possibly never to return, but no, there they were, back 10 minutes later for the final ceremony.
All of the information about which teachers were leaving was considered a closely guarded secret, and even other teachers didn't know until the day before the ceremony. I asked why the secrecy was necessary to keep such information from the students and I was told that it prevents them from becoming upset and restless in class before the end of the year. It does also mean, however, that some students find out that their homeroom teacher of 2 years is leaving them and won't be their teacher next year, and they only get 30 minutes at the end of the day to say goodbye.
The third ceremony followed, saying goodbye to our headmaster (the new one reminds me of Dr. Hibbert in the Simpsons with his big belly laugh, he is awesome), and then all was concluded. Less than half an hour later the students had said their goodbyes and gone, but in comparison to the heart felt summer festival that I saw last year, it seemed to ignore the feelings and desires of the students completely. By the time I had returned from lunch, all of the students were gone and the day had ended without me being able to say goodbye. I wandered the school for a while, enjoying the sunshine and the quiet, then returned to my desk and killed time till the end of the school year and my time to go home.
Schools In
The new term started 3 weeks ago and all my new first years arrived from Elementary School. I saw them for the first time at the opening ceremony and they were tiny - I couldn't believe that they were meant to be Junior High School students. I finally finished the round of self-introduction classes with them this afternoon and I already love them - they speak English to me when they see me, they are all well behaved in class, and not one of them has tried to grab my genitals yet (I got groped twice yesterday. I really hate the boys in 3.4 sometimes). Last years first years seem to have moved into the role of second years pretty well, becoming a little bit more confident in themselves, trying to express themselves a little bit more in everything they do and also becoming completely obsessed with sex. Thanks to them, as of last week I can no longer claim that five 13 year old girls haven't ganged together and asked me how big I am, a record I was reluctant to lose. Despite this, I am really happy that I will get to see these students go from their first year here all the way through to graduation in two years time.
Miscellaneous
That is almost all for now, but there are a few things that have happened in the last month that I thought worth mentioning but that don't fit in with the narative above, so here you go:
1. Lunch Ladies
We have school lunch delivered by a local catering company every day. It is left at a central room on the ground floor and a few students from each class collect the lunch, take it back to their classroom, serve it themselves, eat, then clear it all away and return the trays, plates, cultery and containers all back to the original room. All of this is done unsupervised, as teachers are too busy to watch over students sorting out lunch every day. This shows is a level of independant and responsible action that I think would be inconcievable in an English school.
Anyway, my lunch comes into the staff room with that of the other staff members who don't have their own class (the office ladies, the librarian, the school nurse, etc), and at the start of this year I noticed a strange trend - whenever someone is adsent, they disribute the extra food among who ever is there, and from January they almost always gave it to me. I wondered why this was for a long time and considered it a gesture of good will, but then I met the (cute) school librarian in my local supermarket and while we were chatting she told me why; it's because they are worried that I don't eat enough. They found out (some how) that I don't normally eat breakfast and are worried that I don't eat properly, so they are trying to take care of me by always giving me the extra. I don't normally speak to them very much, and I was touched by such a motherly gesture from people that I haven't yet been able to have a proper conversation in Japanese with.
2. Secret English
I think I have mentioned my belief in Secret English on here before - all Japanese people with a basic High School education take a minimum of 6 years English study that forms 1/9th of their entire academic experience, yet most Japanese people can't speak a word until they get really drunk and become confident enough to use it.
Taking the bus to Tokyo to meet Lianne, a beautiful young Japanese girl sat down next to me. She wore a fashionable skirt, black boots and cute glasses, and unable to resist the opportunity, I struck up conversation about 5 minutes into our journey. We were talking for maybe 10 or 15 minutes in Japanese when she tells me that she wants to study abroad at either Surry or Nottingham University, and did I know either of these places? Yes, I told her, but why was she interested in going there? Had she looked at a prospectus or any of the courses? Would she be learning in Japanese? She replied by pulling two prospectuses from her bag, both in English, and showing me what she was thinking of studying. Did she understand them? I asked. The English was incredibly difficult. Yes, she replied, she had been studying English translation for quite a while and was hoping to persue it as a career. 15 minutes we had been talking, all in Japanese. Not a word of English. Un-*******-believable.
We chatted on and off for the next 4 hours in both Japanese and English and exchanged numbers at the end, but I found out early on that she was travelling to Tokyo to visit her boyfriend. You can't have everything.
3. When you thought it couldn't get any better than the bike...
I bought a car - it is a white, Daihatsu Mira and has a 700cc engine. It is actually the smallest car in the world. Pictures to come soon, but here is one that isn't mine to keep you going.
4. Living is easy with eyes closed
A few days before the end of term, I met up with the Chinese lady that works at my school and the Chinese student that she is hired to help. All three of us had dinner together with another friend of hers a few days before, and then on the Sunday we met up to go strawberry picking. It was still the start of March, so temperatures were still dipping below zero in the evenings, but they have tents in which they grow the strawberries during the winter and you are allowed to go round and eat as many as you can before you're sick (which actually turned out to be less than I expected). It was an excellent couple of hours, poncing about in a tent with Andy and two Chinese women, eating strawberries and being scared of bees.
5. A Pefect Memory
As the mornings started to warm up a little in early March, walking to school one morning I saw the most perfect image of my village that I will ever have - an old woman was chasing a chicken across the road with an umbrella. It just doesn't get any better than that.
