In Which Bruce Lee, Toyotaro, and my host dad remind me how to say ‘Killer Stranglehold’ in Japanese.

When work started the day after Hanabitaikai #2 花火大会 (fireworks festival), I rode to work with my desk neighbor, Arai-san, who happens to live down the street from the Kikai family in Shimoda.  

On Tuesday of that week, the day before I had to go to Kumamoto city, the prefectural capital, for yet another 3 day orientation,  the Kikais had a big BBQ and invited a lot of their neighbors and family to attend.  Unlike American BBQs where there is usually one or two people who manage a large grill and cook hamburgers, hotdogs, and steaks and whatnot, Japanese BBQs usually feature much smaller sized BBQs that everyone sits around and manages together by putting smaller slices of meat/seafood onto the grill and taking whatever looks done off the grill and onto your plate.   Some of the stuff that was a little harder to stomach but that I tried (and liked) anyway were the shrimp heads you were expected to eat along with the rest of the body (minus the tail), some other crustacean thing that was the size of my hand and that you had to slice down the middle and such out the meat from each half,  and the work like creatures that come out from these fancy looking sea shells which you eat by grabbing the shell like ‘head’ part of the body, putting the rest of the body in your mouth, and then sliding the meat off with your teeth.  

After the sun set and most of the kids ran inside to play video games/watch TV, I joined the rest of the adults at the table outside the garage (I got the feeling that the Kikais were a little better off than the average Japanese, and not only because they had a garage).  The only light illuminating the area was a motion activated light outside the garage, and the light go off quite frequently.  Each time it did, though, the guy next to me, Udo-san, would say “R-ret’s dancing MAMA!” and my host mom would get up and do a little dance to make the lights turn off.  Other ridiculous quotes from the night that included “MAMA” included the self-introduction from the woman across the table from me (damn me for forgetting her name), which  started with framing her face with her hands and then saying “BEAUTIFUL MAMA!”  So Japanese people do know some English...

The other memorable part of that evening was watching a Bruce Lee movie (Game of Death) later that night with my host dad and brother.  I brushed up on my body part vocabulary as I listened to the body parts Bruce Lee was crushing in each fight.  My host dad is also a Rocky fan, so when I showed him pictures of Philly and the Philly Arts Museum, he got really excited.  Toyotaro was busy playing video games at the time....   Oh well; not everyone is always going to be excited to see pictures of America.

On Wednesday 8/11, I left early on a bus from Hondo to Kumamoto city, the capital of Kumamoto prefecture and its biggest city.  More about my adventures there later.