五足の靴

This is an extremely old story, but at least I'm living up to my promise of posting it. The title means 'Shoes of Five Feet,'　 or maybe 'Five Pairs of Shoes,' but is really the name for the journey of five famous poets who came from Tokyo to Amakusa in the early 20th century to learn about its history, look at its beautiful scenery, and, you know, be all emo about it and write haikus and tankas.

On the fine day of November 3, designated in Japan as 'Culture Day,' all of my schools had a day off to enjoy, well, cultural activities.  In my case, I called up some local JETs and told them about the mini-hike happening in my town on the 五足の靴 (Gosoku-no-kutsu) trail, a roughly 5K hike through the hills and forests along sea coast.

As I was anticipating, most of the attendees were either old-folks, parents, and elementary school students, with the exception of us three JETs and one of my middle schoolers.  Luckily, the one middle schooler who came is probably the best English conversationalist in the school.  I say 'conversationalist' because, while there are definitely a number of girls who and totally dance circles around him when it comes to doing worksheets, he can, unlike most of my students, remember the phrases he's learned and actually string them together to make meaningful sentences, which in turn results into quite natural sounding dialogue.  Also, he's cool because his name is sounds a lot like the Japanese Tiger Woods, Ishikawa Ryo, who is a sports icon in Japan.

Introducing my kids to some of the other 'big scary foreigner' JETs was fun, though one of those aforementioned big scary foreigners is notoriously late for everything and caused us to be late in getting on the trail.  All fun, though, as most of the staff running the event knew him for some reason and jokingly rebuked him when he did finally appear.

The hike itself was fairly short, though enjoyable.  The path lead up into the forested hills where we reached a lookout post and enjoyed the view of the shore, and the path ended by diving down into the cute village with plenty of friendly old people out gardening and saying hi to us as we passed by.  There were several quiz challenges along the way, as well as a task that involved measuring 1kg of sand exactly, without consulting a scale.

While I was perfectly satisfied with this memorable morning of hiking and fun, I didn't realize that most of the people who came had a different motivation in mind...  You see, in order to get people to come to community events, sometimes you need to offer some incentives.  In this case, there was a raffle at the end of the hike that included such prizes as a brand new folding bike, 20 kg of rice, fresh vegetables, and all sorts of gifts cards and other types of food.  As luck would have it, almost everyone got something except me, though one of the other JETs was nice enough to give me his prize futon warmer as consolation.

So now you know.  Go to local events in your small Japanese town, because they will have fabulous prizes at the end for you.

The rest of the day I'll abbreviate:  with George, the JET from two towns below me, I drove the long way to Hondo to see enjoy the nice weather along the cost, went to an onsen, ate the most tenderly cooked whole chicken in my life (it was like the whole thing was edible; there was no need for knife or even fork, since it was already cut into chunks that you could just pick off), went to several pottery and photo exhibits in abandoned shops in Hondo's old shopping arcade where I met hippy Japanese people who had funky English nicknames like "Chop,"  and went to Uniqlo, everyone's favorite clothing store.  I think I got my fill of culture for the day.

Cold Soapy Fate

This is a delayed blog post.  Also, the title has nothing to do with the contents.  Merely a snippet of goodness from a recent skype conversation I had.

This morning was the first day of work of 2011 (平成２３年度, 23 year of the Heisei period).  To my interest and surprise, everyone wore slightly better clothes to work today and spent the first 10 minutes of work going around and bowing to everybody in the office saying 今年もよろしくお願いします Kotoshi-mo yoroshiku onegaishimasu (This year too, may we work well together).  Yoroshiku onegaishimasu, something that is said very often around the work place and almost as a rule when you meet someone.  It’s probably the strangest phrase to translate and, though you learn from day one in Japanese class, it is still difficult for me to understand when and where to use it.  Often I just throw it in to whatever conversation I’m having at work at the very end, just in case.  Yoroshiku is an adverbial form of ‘good,’  and onegaishimasu means ‘to request, ask, or implore.’  Literally, I guess it means “I will goodly request of you,” or better “I will humbly rely on you.”   Most textbooks translate it as “nice to meet you,” when used in the context of a self-introduction.

Now you can give your self introduction in Japanese too: to say “Hi my name is _____. Nice to meet you,”  you say “Watashi-wa ____________ des. Douzo yoroshiku onegaishimasu.”  私は＿＿＿＿です。どうぞよろしくお願いします。

Right now, I'm in a sort of 'vacation limbo' because, while I have no classes to teach as my kids are still on vacation (or at least the Japanese version of vacation, wherein they still come to school everyday to do sports and have tons of homework), I still have to go to my Board of Education office and 'work' all day.  This can be good at times, because sometimes I do get around to making lesson plans, studying Japanese, or shooting the breeze with my co-workers, but sometimes it can be excruciatingly boring.    Maybe I'll use this time to write those blog entries I've always meant to write...

Trip Memories- 旅行の思い出

It's the night of New Year's day, and I'm finally back in Amakusa. The trip sure was tiring (the average distance we walked each day was around 17K), but we're finally back safe and sound.

Sam and Sayaka unfortunately suffered from some illness during the trip, so it was all for the best that we came home on the afternoon of the 30th.  Sadly, this also meant that we missed the snow fall on the 31st that would have created some great opportunities for photos, but since we had no way of knowing and since we were already exhausted, we can't feel too bad.  

Please check out some of the photos here. （リンックをクリクすると、京都の旅行の写真が見えます。）

While I got a lot of good pictures on the trip, some of the best memories we/I had on the trip weren't ones I captured on film. For example, consider our second day in the city:

After going to Kinkaku-ji the famous gold covered temple in northern Kyoto, and after visiting a few neighboring UNESCO world heritage sites, we walked through a strange complex of temples called Myoushin-ji 妙心寺 to get to a train station.  After a trip to the bathroom, it started hailing and raining.  We only had one umbrella between the three of us, but as we were passing a cafe on the way to the station, an elderly man おじいちゃん stepped out and handed me a handy compact umbrella.  I tried to refuse at first, but he told me to go ahead and take it and not worry about giving it back.  Now I have a new umbrella! It's amazing where and when you'll be touched by the kindness of other people.

Continuing the theme of 'encounters-with-kind-strangers' (sort-of), there's a story attached to our journey back to Sam's place in Nagasaki.  Upon getting off the train at Nagasaki station we crossed the street to wait for the bus to Sam's neighborhood (about 10 minutes away by car).  A punk-ish, twenty-something Japanese dude with fake glasses, spiky hair, and more than a few ear piercings saw that we were a little confused by the bus schedule and pointed out that we missed the last bus.  Since he had to go to the same neck of the city as us, he decided to walk a couple blocks and then get a cab with us.  Sure, I understand that he was probably looking to get a deal on his cab fare, and there was the possibility that he was probably drunk too, but it was nevertheless and interesting encounter.  He did a pretty good job talking in English now and then, and in the car he tried to explain elements of Japanese culture to me (as if it was his duty to explain the mysteries of Japan to us foreigners), and at the end of the car ride he gave us both a big man-hug and told us we should go out drinking sometime.  Interesting fellow...

Finally, one of the best memories of the vacation was on the day we visited Nara.  After walking a fair amount around the park area where most of the temples are located, we headed back to the shopping arcade streets that led up to the train station to grab lunch.  Along the way, we saw a huge crowd of people gathering outside one particular shop.  What could possibly so good/interesting that would draw so many people's attention and cause traffic jams in the narrow street?  FRESH MOCHI OF COURSE! I had spotted the giant wooden hammers and stone basin in a store window on the way to the temples that morning, and now two buff guys were hammering away at a steaming mass of freshly cooked mochi rice.  After adequate pounding, the sticky mess was thrown into a machine, powdered with flower, and filled with anko paste (sweet bean paste), and sent out to be rolled into perfect balls of dessert-y goodness.  People started pushing and shoving to get in line for the still-warm treats, and a extra salesman was sent out in the street to direct traffic around the hordes of people lining up to buy mochi.  We jumped in line and got two pieces fresh off the line.  They were so warm that they practically fell apart as we bit into them, but it was the best mochi I've ever head.