It's big for Japan, especially for just one person. My friend Yoko lives in a similar sized apartment, along with her mother, father, and brother. It looked a lot different from how it was when I arrived. I've moved unwanted furniture out too make more free space. Now if I could just find a way to heighten the doorways.
Saturday I went to Fukuoka for the once-a-year Sumo tournament. There are only six per year in all of Japan, so I was really lucky to catch it. Sumo might seem like a novelty to westerners, but in Japan it has tremendous cultural significance. The sport dates back about 1500 years, when the matches were part of religious ceremonies at shrines. In the ensuing centuries, the matches moved from the shrines to the imperial courts. Rules were formed and within time Sumo became the national sport of Japan. Today, the only remnant of Sumo's religious past is the shrine-like roof that hangs over the ring.
On Saturday, the first bout was at 8:30am, but I didn't make it there until 4, which gave me a couple of hours to get some photos before the final match at 6:00. Besides, I'd fall asleep if I was there for any longer. Inside the arena it's impossibly quiet. Each bout lasts about 10 minutes, but it's really 9.5 minutes of preparation and just a few seconds of action.
I spent most of the time sneaking around the entrance area trying to grab candid shots of rikishi. They aren't as big as you'd imagine–just really wide. Of course, there are a few giants, but most are Eastern Europeans. The #1 in the world now is a Mongolian, Asasyoryu. In the mid 90s, another group of foreigners, Hawaiians, dominated the sport. It's surprising that only a few decades ago rikishi were only Japanese.
Go to my Flickr page to see more photos.
By the way, they pronounce it "smo"–the 'u' is muted in many Japanese words.
That's right. Put your hands together for Tashiro junior high for its performance in the English speech contest last week. We took home 1st place for 7th and 9th grade and 2nd place for 8th grade. We were most definitely the best school, which turned heads because Tashiro is known around town as having slouching students.
Not on my clock–not when it comes to English speech contest. This was my one chance to prove that I could make a palpable impact on the English teaching at my school. The benefits of my presence in the classroom are nebulous, so the speech contest was the way to make it real, to validate my job, for myself and my superiors.
For two months I stayed late after school. I recorded myself doing the speeches, one time fast and one time slow, and burned CDs for the students to listen to, to master the pronunciation and intonation. I held rounds of auditions to narrow down the best students at each level. I listened and corrected mistakes and gave advice and clapped and cheered. I've heard these three speeches at least 5000 times.
At the contest, I might have been the most nervous one in attendance. All that work was riding on a few 2-minute speeches. It could go to nothing with a blip here or there. But they didn't mess up, not once. Each gave their best performance yet. The results were announced and I was imagining getting high fives and hugs of cheer from the teachers back at school. But when we got back to schoool, no one seemed to care. It's all good–I don't need approval, the awards speak for themselves.
The 1st placers will move on to the prefectural contest on Tuesday, for which we are practicing more. I'll give a recap shortly thereafter.
My brain is running extra fast these days, and so are my legs. Possibly the crispy weather. Or the new mixes I've been assembling for my early morning jogs. More likely it's all the fish I've been eating since last Friday, when I went fishing with two teachers from school. The trip was a success, with each of us hauling in 20 or so fish. Almost all were either Aji (sea bream) or Saba (mackerel).
A few days prior to the trip, Mashima-san and Tanaka-san handed me a printed map and pointed to the following hand-written text:
3:45 AM
8°
2 red dots (one for the location of my house on the map, the other for the corner of the road where they will pick me up at 3:45 am when it's predicted to be 8 degrees). Luckily, it wasn't cold at all. But it was early. Mashima and Tanaka don't speak much English, so many stretches of the 6 hours that we were on the boat there were extended silences interupted occasionally by a fish on the line.
Ahh, happiness is coming home with a cooler full of fish. Every meal, other than breakfast, that I ate for the ensuing 5 days included a fish or two. Sashimi, fried, salt-baked, with sweet "arani" sauce. I ate it all, and now that it's gone, I want more. Even if I have to wake up at 3:30.
This is a picture of Mashima with a Boda, which I don't know how to say in English.
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, is the new collection of short stories from the Japanese magical realist. Short stories, Murakami has admitted, are "a kind of experimental laboratory for me as a novelist." Anyone who has read Murakami's novels will notice that some of the stories in Blind Willow are beginnings or snippets that were later developed into novels. Read the review on Salon, NY Times, the Guardian. The Kobe-reared author is featured in this month's Times books section. Click here for interviews and reviews of past works.
A few years ago, following the release of Murakami's most popular novel, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Salon writer Laura Miller got a fascinating interview out of the notoriously reticent author. Murakami is forthcoming about his love for (Western) pop culture, inspiration for The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and the consequences of being an individualist in Japan. Check it.
Here are some of Murakami's own words on...
The lack of a palpable 'Japanese identity' in his writing:
"In a way we were lost, the Japanese. We have been working so hard since just after the war. We were getting rich. We reached a certain stage, but after reaching it, we asked ourselves: Where are we going? What are we doing? It's a sense of loss."
His empathy for the people of Tokyo:
"So, I myself hate those company people–salarymen, businesspeople. Some of them got up at 5:30 in the morning to commute to the center of Tokyo. It takes more than two hours by train, all of it packed like this [hunches]. You can't even read a book. But they are doing that for 30 or 40 years. That's incredible to me. They come home at 10 p.m. and their kids are sleeping. The only day they see their children is Sunday. It's horrible. But they don't complain. So I asked them why not and they said it's no use. It's what all the people are doing, so there's no reason to complain."
The process of writing scary and soul-baring stuff:
"When you want a tiger's cub, you have to enter the tiger's den."
This was a couple of weeks ago but it's still fresh on my mind. I went with a few other teachers and all of the 7th graders on a 12K walk from the school to the top of the mountain that looks over Tosu city. The students were nearly indistinguishable dressed in matching blue track suits and gleaming white shoes. That's part of why it's so hard to remember their names.
Before we left the school in the morning, the students were told that they must speak to me–if only a couple of words–at least once in the duration of the hike. There were few words other than "hello" that were said. We stoppeed at the top of the hill for lunch and recesss. I joined the students during lunch and was given pocket-fulls of candy, cookies, chips, etc.
On the way back down, one of the students thought it would be funny to sneak behind me and shove a plastic baseball bat towards my butt. It didn't have the force or momentum of a concho–a classic Japanese schoolboy stunt, in which a boy forms his hands in the shape of a pistol and pokes another human in the butt–but the intention was the same. So I reacted as though I had been concho-ed and the culprit was denied access to the bat for the remainder of the journey.
Despite the disturbance to my nether regions, it was a great day. This is a picture of me and some students. As you can see, we all have the "peace" sign thrown up. This is the compulsory pose for Japanese girls and boys under the age of 15.
For fun, for real. It was an overcast day on Mountain Kuju. The temperature dropped and wind increase as Namikawa and I made our ascent to the 1700m peak. When we got there, we ate a colorful assortment of plasticky bento bites, piping hot ramen, and weiners, and washed it all down with red wine and semi-cold Asahi beer.
Kuju is a popular spot for day trippers and amateur hikers. That Sunday, there were hoards of people dotted all over the moutain. But I was the only foreigner–the only one not decked head-to-toe in pricey hiking gear: leather boots, goretex parkas, titanium poles..
In case you're wondering, Namikawa is my #1 Japanese tomodachi. We see each other only about once a month, but we always have a good time together. A few days after this hike, he went with me to a club here in Tosu. Like all mid-aged Japanese guys, he's perpetually dressed in business garb, which made him stand out (maybe even more than me) in the compact, bass bumping club.