More Tennis Practice

I couldn't get enough soft tennis after only one lesson, so this past Monday I went to Shoji's last practice with his college team. It was cold and rainy at the start of the practice, so only four other team members were there. I brought along my friend Nan, another student from U of I. Nan plays hard tennis, which uses the yellow ball and which is what most people from the U.S. think of when they think of tennis. Nan and Shoji borrowed each other's rackets and tried out both types of tennis during the practice time, but of course, each man excelled at his original type of tennis. I had fun watching, and they brought out an extra racket for me too and both took turns hitting the ball with me on the court.

桜 Cherry Blossoms

I know if I write about cherry blossoms a picture absolutely must accompany the entry. However, as of yet, I have been selfish and have been purely enjoying the cherry blossoms for myself without taking a single picture. I try to make sure that I look at them every time I pass even a single tree. However, I also look at their beauty and I feel sad, because the season in which the cherry blossoms bloom truly emphasizes life`s impermanence. The blossoms are so splendid, yet they are also so fragile and short-lived, just like our time with the people we care about most. I want the blossoms to last forever, just as I never want to say goodbye to those I really care about, yet the time inevitably comes when the blossoms must fall and I must be separated from my family and friends. Cherry blossom season comes at the end of March and the beginning of April, a time of goodbyes and new beginnings in Japan. At the end of March, many students have graduation ceremonies and must say goodbye to their friends with whom they spent so many years attending classes and obtaining an education. April, which brings the start of a new school year in a different school, or the start of work for university graduates, is a time of meeting new people but also of being separated from those of whom you have grown so fond. Then again, if I am patient and simply wait, I know I can count on the cherry blossoms to return next year.

Graduation Ceremonies and Spring Vacations

This past Thursday was the graduation ceremony at Konan University for seniors graduating in 2010. The past two months have been spring break for Konan students, so the campus has been very empty, but on Thursday, it suddenly became very lively as 2,000 graduating seniors and all their friends came to the campus to celebrate. The graduation ceremony took place in the gymnasium, but I heard the ceremony was full of speeches and was not terribly interesting. But afterward, I heard so much noise coming from the main campus area. I don't know how university graduation ceremonies and the celebrations afterward work in the U.S. (never having attended one myself), but at Konan University, it seemed as though everyone was meeting up with schoolmates and friends from their extracurricular activities. The younger students in the sports and culture clubs made sure that the graduating seniors received presents, bouquets, and cards from all the other club members, and everyone takes pictures together and makes a big deal out of presenting the seniors with their gifts. Then every single club seems to have its own drinking party planned, and on Thursday night downtown Sannomiya, the center of Kobe City, was filled with drunk graduates and their younger club member counterparts.

Also, I feel as though despite Japanese college students being on break for the past two months, they still come to school a lot during their spring vacations. If the students are second year or third year students, they are starting job hunting, but other students still come to school to study, which seems very different from what myself and other U.S. college students do during summer vacations. High school students are also on spring vacation right now, but I see so many high school students that attend the school across the street from my host family's house dressed up in uniform and walking to school every morning. I guess they are doing sports and music practices every day, but it still seems like a greater percentage of students come to school every day here in Japan than high school students in the U.S. do during summer vacations.

相撲 - Sumo Tournament

On Tuesday afternoon I went to Osaka to see the annual Osaka Sumo Tournament which is held there every March! The tournament lasts about two weeks, and I believe that each sumo wrestler has one bout each day. Tuesday was the tenth day of the tournament, so my friends and I had fun guessing which wrestler would win each bout based on their records from the previous nine days.

I felt like there were almost as many foreigners watching the tournament as there were Japanese people. Then again, about a fourth of the sumo wrestlers themselves are foreigners! Before each bout, a man would step into the middle of the dohyou (sumo ring) and chant the names of the next two wrestlers. Wrestlers were divided into the "east" side and the "west" side (the wrestlers came into the arena a bout or two before their own bout and would sit waiting on either the east or west side of the dohyou). Then the wrestlers would come up into the ring area. They would ready themselves in the corners of the raised platform area, outside of the ring, and wipe their faces with towels and drink water out of bamboo pails. They loudly slapped their stomachs, buttocks, and thighs as they prepared themselves for the bouts. Then they would grab a handful of salt and toss the salt into the ring as they stepped into it to purify the ring. They lined up on the white lines inside the ring, and if the atmosphere was right, they would wrestle. Sometimes this entire ritual was repeated three or four times before the atmosphere was right. I don't know what qualifications are needed for the "correct" atmosphere.

The bouts are usually pretty short, maybe fifteen or twenty seconds, but a few times they went on for half a minute or a minute, which was really exciting. One time the bout was so long that the priest who was acting as a referee stopped the wrestlers, and the two wrestlers had to start the bout over again. People sometimes shout at the wrestlers as they fight, and the word "nokotta" can be heard especially often. It means that there is still space remaining between where the wrestlers' feet are and the edge of the ring, so keep going, keep fighting.

My friends and I arrived at about 2:00 p.m., but the match had been going on since 8:00 a.m., and we stayed until it ended at 6:00 p.m. Four hours of nothing but sumo matches? Not nearly enough for me!

歌舞伎 (Kabuki) Theater

Do you recall the play I wrote about a few entries back, the play in which two lovers end up committing suicide in order to be together in the next world because they can't be together in this world? Well, yesterday I went to a theater in Kyoto City and saw that play, "Love Suicides at Sonezaki," performed live by kabuki actors. Kabuki is a form of Japanese theater that was created a few centuries ago and is still highly popular due to its being made for common people and its use of techniques that makes it engaging and appealing to watch. While other forms of traditional Japanese theater consist of subtle movements, simple costumes, and masks, kabuki relies on fast-paced dance and acrobatics, vivid costumes, and elaborate makeup to help appeal to audience members.

The four hour long performance I saw yesterday consisted of one famous act from one play, the entire production of "Love Suicides at Sonezaki," and finally a dance from an interlude of a noh play (noh is a different type of traditional Japanese theater). The plays were difficult to understand because they were all in Japanese, and unlike the puppet theater performance I saw earlier this year, there were no supertitles from which I could try to read and decipher meaning. But the dialogues were interesting and fast-paced, which kept my attention, and of course the costumes and makeup were also quite appealing to the eye. As for the performance of the entire play "Love Suicides at Sonezaki," I was glad I had read the script before because it helped me understand what I couldn't pick up from the characters' dialogues. Also, since the story is a tragedy, not a comedy, it seemed that, contrary to my expectations, there were less dance and acrobatic movements than I expected.

One unique part of kabuki theater is the audience participation. In other forms of Japanese theater, such as noh or puppet theater, the audience sits quietly and listens. But during kabuki performances, the audience is expected to remark upon the performance by yelling loudly during certain parts if the audience likes what the actors do or if the audience reacts strongly to certain parts of the performance. I wish I could have understood what the audience members were yelling, but there was a particularly vocal man about two rows behind me, and whenever an actor did a particularly great job portraying a difficult scene, the man shouted what I believe was his approval. I was also impressed with the actors' abilities to concentrate despite the audience members yelling at unexpected times.

Saturday, March 20 - Miyajima and Iwakuni

I visited both Miyajima Island and Iwakuni City with my parents this past February, but as expected, upon going with a different group of people I had completely different yet still very fun adventures.

At Miyajima the tide was low, so the water was not lapping against the shrine pillars like it was the last time I went. Since there was no festival on Saturday (there was a festival going on last time I went), there were no special prayer ceremonies in Itsukushima Shrine (the shrine on Miyajima Island) conducted by the priests working there. I also visited this temple called Daishoin (I visited this temple with my parents as well). Due to the festival going on the last time I was there, the temple was incredibly crowded and noisy. But on Saturday it was serene save for the occasional pounding of drums heard from within a pagoda situated on the temple grounds.

After lighting a candle at Daishoin Temple, I decided to try hiking up Mount Misen, the main mountain on Miyajima Island. I had long since lost sight of my foreign exchange student friends, so I went climbing alone, but engaged in several all-Japanese conversations with fellow hikers, including a conversation with a foreign exchange student from Western Michigan University. I ran out of water and time halfway up the mountain, so I turned around and came down, but the view was beautiful despite the haze, and I certainly got my heart rate up by climbing all those stairs.

In the afternoon everyone was exhausted from walking all over Miyajima Island, but we were scheduled to visit Iwakuni City, so we all did a bit of walking there, as well. In addition to seeing the famous Kintaikyou bridge, the former samurai residences, the water fountain, and riding up the cable car like I did last time, my friends and I found some hedges that were in a kind of maze formation. Of course we wanted to play in the hedge maze, and we got in a few lively rounds of Pacman before heading on to Tokuyama City to spend the night.

Friday, March 19 - Hiroshima

I know I've been out of the picture this past week, but spring is a very happening time, so expect to see more entries this week.

On Friday I left for Hiroshima with the other students in my foreign exchange program. We rode the "Nozomi," the fastest Shinkansen (bullet train) to Hiroshima City. Our first stop was "Okonomimura," (okonomiyaki village), at which we all split up into groups and were able to cook and eat our own okonomiyaki, which is a grilled food that looks like a pancake and has egg, meat, cabbage, and noodles mixed in. Hiroshima is famous for this food, so although I've eaten it in Kobe, it's different eating it in Hiroshima.

Next we went as a group to the Peace Park and Memorial Museum. The museum was intense, and it described Hiroshima's pre-World War II history, how Hiroshima was chosen as the site on which to drop the first atomic bomb, and the effects the bomb had on Hiroshima's citizens and urban area. It went into great detail, and there were many models and photographs within the museum.

I walked through the Peace Park briefly, and I also met for the first time a friend who is studying abroad at Hiroshima University, so we compared notes on our exchange programs, and he and his friend walked me to Hiroshima Castle, which increased my Japanese castle count up to six castles visited during the past seven months.

Star Wars Play Update

My Japanese class is going ahead with the plan to create our own Star Wars parody. We found a complete script online with each line translated into Japanese, which is perfect for our project. We are choosing the important lines from our favorite scenes, memorizing them, and then taping them with a classmate's video camera recorder. We've also already started working on props, such as buying a mask that one usually wears on a train to prevent the spread of illness, and we colored it black with a permanent marker (that goes to the person playing Darth Vader). We have to finish our video and have it ready to present to the teachers on April 2nd, which doesn't give us a lot of time to memorize everything. But this way, we'll just pick the most important lines from our favorite scenes, and we wont' shoot a bunch of unnecessary footage.

This weekend I'm returning to Hiroshima City and Iwakuni City, two places I visited with my parents in February. I'll update you all upon return from my weekend trip!

お水取り (Omizu-tori)

This past Saturday I ventured to Nara to see Omizu-tori, a special festival that has been celebrated at Todai-ji Temple for over 1200 years. You may recall from an earlier blog entry of mine that Todai-ji is the place that houses one of the biggest sitting buddha statues in the world. This festival is celebrated so that water drawn from a huge well can be purified using fire torches.

It takes over two hours to travel from my home in Kobe to Todai-ji in Nara, and to be on the safe side, I arrived a little early. It took about twenty minutes to walk from the train station to Todai-ji, but the temperature was above average, and the walk was pleasant. I entered the temple grounds forty-five minutes before the ceremony was to begin, and it was already packed! I was standing pretty far back from the temple itself, which was not anywhere near the sanctuary in which the buddha statue is situated. People kept arriving behind where I was standing, and soon the entire area was filled up. I'm sure there were people lining the pathway through the woods up to the temple area, but I doubt they were able to see any of the ceremony because of all the trees.

The ceremony consisted of men holding extremely long (maybe three meters?) poles with bundles of flaming sticks tied to the far ends. The poles were held up high in the air and waved around, all the while pieces of burning sticks and sparks were flying off the ends. The men would wave the poles on the left side of the temple, then run along the edge of the temple platform while twirling the poles and finally stop at the right end of the temple, wave the pole some more until all the sticks had burned and fallen off, and then the next man and pole would arrive. My host mom had warned me to not sit too close to the front lest I sit underneath the falling sparks, but there was no way that would have happened given the size of the crowd. The ceremony itself lasted for a mere twenty minutes, but I'm glad I was able to experience yet another Japanese tradition.

Japanese Class as a Star Wars Parody?

Last Tuesday during lunch, my foreign exchange student friends and I started comparing ourselves to Star Wars characters (I ended up as Princess Leia). The following day in Japanese class, as a joke I wrote on the white board "E Class Star Wars Saga," and listed all of my fellow E class classmates, foreign exchange students from other Japanese classes, and one Japanese friend plus their corresponding Star Wars characters. You see, E class is supposed to be creating a newspaper as a writing assignment, but I jokingly said that writing and performing a Star Wars parody script would be more fun. I actually told the teacher my thoughts, and she apparently told the teacher who is in charge of my Japanese class (we have three separate teachers, depending on the day of the week). Then on Thursday, the head E class teacher informed my class that we would actually be writing a Star Wars parody script instead of a newspaper...! Writing a play is very difficult, much less finding costumes and props and getting everyone to perform it, especially if some of the foreign exchange students are in different classes. I don't know how realistic this is... At least if we can't actually perform it, we can try to write it. I think it's funny that what started out as a joke turned into an actual assignment...

Thanks to midterm examinations I haven't added any new entries lately. I had my oral examination on Wednesday. I prepared and memorized a summary I had written based on the Disney movie version of Aladdin, because one of the two assignments for examination was to present a summary of your favorite childhood story. Of course I wasn't able to pick a favorite story, but sure, Aladdin's up there. I also had to speak to my examiner using keigo, or respectful speech. I never find myself presented with opportunities to use exclusively keigo in conversation here in Japan because it's used mostly at work, and I do not currently have a job here. Business men and women use it at their offices, and keigo is also famous for being used, among other places, by elevator operators in fancy department stores. Within keigo I can think of two main categories. One is sonkeigo, which is speech used to respect your listener because they are in a higher position than you are (for example, one uses this when referring to a boss's actions if one is a business man or woman at a company). Another is kenjougo, or humble speech, which is used to describe the speaker's actions and place the speaker in a lower social position than the listener because the listener is a boss or a customer. There is, however, another respectful form of speech that isn't as fancy as keigo but I use quite often, called teinego, or polite speech. It does not require knowledge of special verbs that change depending on whether one is referring to the speaker or the listener's actions, and I use this form of respectful speech when speaking with my teachers at school.

I found out this past Monday that I won an honorable mention in the foreign exchange student program's Japanese language essay contest. I wrote an essay about a rough day at school and a stranger who came and talked to me and helped me feel better and forget, for a few minutes, that I'd had a difficult class that day. I never found out his name or contact information, and I don't think I'll ever see him again, but I'll always remember his kind gesture. I received a certificate from the Japanese language teachers, and they also awarded me with a prize (a bag of sweets), which I decided to share with "anyone to whom I've ever asked, 'How do you read this kanji ?'" which is most of the people I know here in Japan.

Chikamatsu Monzaemon

For those of you who are wondering what that long bunch of Japanese in the title line means, it's actually a person's name. Chikamatsu (surname) is one of the most well-known Japanese playwrights of the Edo period (he wrote from the 1670s through the 1720s). I volunteered to do a short, in-class presentation summarizing a reading assignment about him which we were given, and it turned out to be one of the most interesting assignments that we have read this semester in Japanese literature class.

The introduction described Chikamatsu as being raised in a well-off family but going on to work with actors, people who were, at the time, considered social outcasts. I wonder why actors were considered social outcasts during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. I'm thinking that it may have something to do with society associating the theater world with risqu é or even base values and/or activities. But then again, Chikamatsu's plays often include characters who display samurai values such as loyalty, devotion, and honor, values that would probably be respected by society at large.

The play that I read was a sewamono, a genre in which three-scene, one act plays that deal with sensational current events are written. Indeed, The Love Suicides at Sonezaki, the play that was included in the packet I read, was based on a true incident and was first performed only a month after the incident occurred. The play takes place in what is modern-day Osaka, the huge city next to where I live. Tokubei, the protagonist, falls in love with Ohatsu, a prostitute. Tokubei spends all of his money on Ohatsu and falls on hard times, so Tokubei's boss from the soy sauce factory, who also happens to be Tokubei's uncle, decides to try to help Tokubei by allowing Tokubei to marry the boss's wife's niece. Tokubei, however, does not want to marry her, which causes him to fall into his boss's disfavor. Furthermore, when Tokubei tries to return the dowry money to his boss, he realizes that his friend Kuheiji, who borrowed Tokubei's dowry money and was supposed to return it the next day, is pretending to have never borrowed any money from Tokubei, and refuses to pay Tokubei back. Tokubei has no way to redeem his honor by staying alive, and Ohatsu is so devoted to him that she refuses to be left alone in the world without him, so the two lovers head to the Sonezaki forest and commit a double suicide.

If you could follow all that, you'd surely agree with me how sad the story is. The protagonist is whole-heartedly a good person, but various events prevent him from living with honor, leaving him no choice but to kill himself. The concept of honor is one of the several samurai values that Chikamatsu incorporated into this play. Other important aspects of Chikamatsu's writing that make his works interesting to read are his emphasis on passion and emotion and his inclusion of the struggle between reason and desire. These focal points make Chikamatsu's works easy to relate to, because the audience can empathize with the characters' emotions and struggles between reason and desire.

ひな祭り - Doll Festival

March 3rd is the modern-day date picked to celebrate ひな祭り, or the Doll Festival, which is celebrated specifically by families with daughters, usually young daughters. Yesterday I celebrated at my friend Yuya's house. Yuya is eighteen; however, she is the only daughter out of four children in the Nishiguchi household. Therefore, her family probably loves to honor her each year by celebrating the ひな祭り.

Decorations for the festival can get pretty elaborate. There will typically be a shelf set up in one corner of a room in the house (big shelves, like the one at the Nishiguchi household, can be up to five tiers high, like a staircase). The shelf is covered in red cloth, and usually anywhere from ten to twenty dolls, both boy dolls and girl dolls, are placed upon the shelf. The dolls are all adorned in traditional kimono and clothing and hats, but when people celebrate this festival, they themselves usually wear western style clothing as opposed to traditional Japanese clothing. The dolls are supposed to be put away soon after the holiday ends; it is said that if you delay in cleaning up and storing the dolls away, your daughter's marriage will be delayed. I had two little dolls hanging in my room as decorations, and I made sure to put them away this morning before I went to school!

I learned of two foods that are normally eaten during this holiday. One is a special type of sushi that involves a huge container filled with sushi rice and then different types of raw fish, vegetables, egg, and other toppings piled on top of the rice in a colorful, artful design. Raw fish is still expensive and I'd say somewhat of a delicacy in Japan, so it makes sense to eat this sort of dish when celebrating a festival. The other food I learned of is a snack called hina-arare. These are cruchy little balls made of rice flour. They are colored green, pink, white, and brown, and they normally have a salty flavor. Lately, however, Japan has started making these snacks with both sweet and salty flavors mixed into the package, and some of the balls are even covered in chocolate.

In ancient times, this holiday was celebrated on April 3rd, when the weather is warm. Okaasan said it's difficult to unpack the dolls at the beginning of March when the closet and room they're stored in are cold, so in keeping with the ancient tradition, my host family celebrates this holiday on April 3rd instead of March 3rd. This means that I am lucky enough to get to celebrate this holiday twice this year!!!