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.