Oh Dear God
26 May 2012 2 Comments
in Fail
Just moments ago, I escaped from the 7-11 with my life, and just barely with my dignity. Today, it appears that 7-11 is for some reason promoting SMAP and One Piece at the same time. This meant that store employees were out in full force, wearing straw hats and jamming SMAP flyers in my face. If I hadn’t really needed to pay my electric bill, I would have walked past when I saw the two flyer-flingers, eyes fixed straight ahead, forgetting that I ever knew of the existence of such things as convenience stores.
Sadly, my bill was already two days late, so I had to brave it. I staunchly turned my head aside to avoid eye contact and dodged around the flyer, then slipped in. To my horror, as I am always easily embarrassed on behalf of others, there were six more employees inside, all wearing straw hats. Since I had no idea about the One Piece promotion and could only see the SMAP flyers, I was trying to work out what the hell SMAP had to do with cowboy hats. Incidentally, One Piece doesn’t have anything to do with cowboy hats, either, but the main character wears a straw skimmer for some reason, so the employees were apparently issued straw cowboy hats from the 100 yen shop.
On a mission for paper towels, I carefully ducked through the aisles to avoid any nonsense. I could see that in one aisle, they had samples of food and flyers and all kinds of ridiculousness, so I peeked from one aisle to the next to try to locate the paper towels without having to pass by any enthusiastic employees. At last, success! I found the paper towels. But my heart sank as I realized I would have to walk past them to get to the cash registers. I got in line and quickly shook my head at the offer to try something orange I could see out of the corner of my eye. But then the guy hawking the orange stuff decided to ring me up. I almost forgot to pay my electric bill in all the confusion, and I counted out my change wrong, each mistake only prolonging my awkward contact with the employee, who really seemed pleased as punch to be wearing the dumb hat and pushing the unrelated SMAP merchandise. Finally I got the money right and escaped without any boy band memorabilia. I was lucky.
***
On a Japan-unrelated note, my college friends Anthony Blaha and Tom Fellows have a band called That Noble Fury, and they’ve just released their eponymous first album! I always enjoyed listening to them play in college, back when they were Anthony Blaha and the Goodfellows, but this album is really something else. It’s beautifully produced, the instrumentals are superb and richly textured with strings as well as the expected rock instruments, the music is intricately written, and the lyrics are clever and poignant. I think anyone would be pleasantly surprised that a little band that grew out of a small, nerdy college is making such high-quality and interesting music, so I felt I had to plug it here.
If you’re looking for a thoughtful new music flavor, please check the band out. You can listen to and download their music here, on iTunes, or on Spotify. They’re also nominated for New England Artist of the Month on The Deli, and I’m sure they’d appreciate your votes!
Mishima, You Fabulous Bastard
25 May 2012 1 Comment
in Performances, Win
How did I spend last weekend? my readers might ask. And for once, instead of answering “Studying and doing laundry,” I would answer, “Seeing something absolutely unforgettable. And then my readers would feel bad about whatever they did on Sunday.
This unforgettable thing I saw was Mishima Yukio’s 1969 kabuki play, 「珍説弓張り月」 which I can’t think of an elegant translation for, so we’ll just call it “Chinsetsu Yumihari Zuki.” I went to see it at Shinbashi Enbujo, a theater just outside the posh Ginza area. It’s smaller than the National Theater, where this play has been staged at least twice, but it’s not a bad space, despite the carpet being threadbare in spots. The seats are more comfortable, anyway, which is important when you realize, as I did upon arrival, that the play is 5 hours long.
If you want a synopsis, I’m sure Google will provide one, but I will mention a few of the highlights here. In true Mishima form, the play includes three suicides and one aestheticized naked torture scene. (Actually, though the handbill referred to the scene as “naked,” the executed fellow wears a loincloth, not that Japanese loincloths are particularly modest.) True to kabuki form, there are plenty of other fights and deaths and fantastic goings-on.
Mishima pulled out all the stops for this play, which was written just a year before his death. There are arrows that split rock cliffs, there is a fight with a wild boar (two men in a big hairy costume), there is a giant butterfly that represents the soul of one heroine, there are two huge ships, one of which spectacularly cracks down the middle in a storm, there are tengu, there is a magical heavenly horse that the hero mounts to gallop his way to eternity, and best of all, there is an enormous damn seamonster that chases some of the characters through the waves of a beautifully simulated sea.
Each act features a spectacle so amazing, you can’t help being excited to see how it will be topped after the next curtain. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many elaborate stage tricks and effects crammed into a single kabuki performance before. Dramatically, I find it to be a bit of a diffuse mess, but in terms of spectacle, I can’t imagine how one could top it.
Remember that naked torture scene I mentioned earlier? Of course you do. In the scene, a traitor to our heroes is ordered tortured to death by the lovely Princess Shiranui. She delicately plucks a melody on her koto while her ladies in waiting hammer stakes into the traitor one at a time, skewering him a la St. Sebastian. Fake blood of course rolls down the naked chest as Mishima would have wanted it to. Suddenly, my friend nudges me and subtly indicates the women sitting in front of us. A young woman and a slightly older woman dressed in expensive kimono, they were weeping into their scalloped handkerchiefs.
While kabuki is spectacular, I rarely find that it moves me at all on an emotional level. Although this scene was violent, the character being tortured was not exactly a main character. Why all these tears? my friend and I wondered. In the end, I believe it comes down to one of two hypotheses: either the refined young lady in front of us was that actor’s girlfriend, or else she just needed an excuse to show off her fine handkerchief.
On Whiteness
24 May 2012 3 Comments
I’m not a trained anthropologist, so I’m certainly not going to attempt to explain Japan’s complicated relationship with race and skin color here. There are many people who are far more qualified to do so than I am, and I’m sure that volumes of Japanthropology have been written on the subject. However, my coloring and the way people react to it is part of my experience here in Japan, so I thought I’d jot down something about it.
Being raised in America, in the DC area, in a majority African-American county, I never grew up thinking that being white was particularly cool. Neither did being white distress me as a child. I was white, most of my classmates weren’t, and that was the way it was. I was occasionally addressed as “white girl” by unfamiliar children or even adults, but I only ever remember being insulted on the basis of race once. Some acquaintances were curious about my hair, but I don’t recall anybody praising my pigmentation. Why would they?
In Japan, of course, things are different. Many people assume that my hair would be my most exotic trait for Japanese people, and some do compliment me on it, but I find that women in particular are more interested in my skin color than anything else. Skin tone is quite a beauty topic in Japan. “Beautifying whitening liquid” is widely advertised and sold in every drugstore. (Not that such things don’t exist in the US as well.) A majority of models and actresses seem to have skin on the lighter side. The vast array of sun-protective gear employed by ladies in the sunnier months not only prevents wrinkles (supposedly), but also keeps the skin from becoming tanned.
When I am praised for the color of my skin, it makes me deeply uncomfortable. First of all, it never really happens in America, so I don’t even know what kind of reaction is appropriate. Saying “thank you” or turning the comment away with the humble Japanese equivalent seems to reinforce a hierarchy in which light skin is considered somehow better than dark skin, so it doesn’t seem right to me. Besides, skin color isn’t a talent. I didn’t achieve whiteness by some sort of activity. In fact, I often spend the summers working at just the opposite. I usually try to deflect the remarks with a joke, or an explanation that I’m white because of my German heritage.
I can never quite tell whether the skin color issue is purely one of pigmentation, or whether it is influenced by racial issues as well. I have been approached by many acquaintances who are curious about my skin: “Where do you come from? What’s your nationality? Can you never go to the ocean?” However, I see many Japanese men and women every day whose skin is lighter than mine. In fact, the women who have asked me about my skin had fairly light complexions themselves. They were probably no darker than I am. My skin isn’t even the rosy pink and white skin that people of British descent often have. In fact, Japanese cosmetics often match my skin better than American make-up does.
While my hair, eyes, and nose are extremely different from those of most Japanese people, I don’t think my skin has any qualitative difference (except that I have a good deal more arm hair). Japanese people see it differently, though. When I went to a Japanese high school in 2004, the girls in the class encircled me and asked me questions. (“How old are you?” “Have you ever been to Disney World?” “Do you have a boyfriend?” “Why not??”) I remember one of them running over beside me and holding out her arm next to mine. “Look!” she said to her classmates. “Black.” Herself. “White.” Me. They were all very amused.
In 2003, I had hosted a Japanese exchange student named Shiho from our high school’s sister school in Yokohama. She was gorgeous. She was on the dance team in her high school, she dressed well, she had a cool hair cut, she had everything going for her. I almost got into fights chasing off boys who were desperate to romance her during her week-long stay. When I loaned her a dress for a school dance, damned if she didn’t look better in it than I did. Yet while we were on the bus for a field trip to Annapolis, she wistfully told me how much she wanted to have skin and hair like mine. I thought it was very disheartening. Any American girl would kill to look like her.
Unfortunate though that relationship with skin color is, there is a funny side to the reactions to the foreign phenotype, too. About as often as I get asked about my hair, I also get asked about my butt. Having a big ass seems to be considered a talent, much like having light skin. In 2008, a dear Japanese acquaintance of mine (a woman my mother’s age) gazed at my rear for a while and then nodded thoughtfully. “Foreigners really do have big butts.” I laughed and nodded. Indeed, I have yet to see much in the posterior department from Japanese girls. “Why?” she wanted to know. That’s the part that bewildered me. While I have long known that my backside is more generous than, say, Paris Hilton’s, I had never been called upon to explain my bum before. I think I made a half-hearted attempt to describe the genetic process of inheritance, but whatever I said didn’t satisfy Eiko. Unfortunately for her, the foreign butt must remain forever a tantalizing mystery.
Degas It Ain’t
22 May 2012 2 Comments
Quick repost from Facebook:
On the Marunouchi sen train beside me this afternoon:
Male, about 70, with mask over nose and mouth for cold. Wearing beautiful long black wig I wish I owned, big pink bow pinned to the hair, pale pink lacy tank top, neon pink tutu tied with string to invert the shape, two pairs of pale pink tights, sequined platform wedges.
I’ll try to do a proper post tomorrow. Perhaps even two will be written this week. Stay tuned!
Trivial Existence
11 May 2012 Leave a Comment
I don’t have any startling insights for a full-fledged post today, so I thought I might talk a little about trivia.
I’m not sure whether Americans or Japanese love trivia more, but I certainly encounter a lot of trivia here every day.
The train is always a great source of trivia. I take three trains every morning. Now I take two Tokyo Metro trains and one Tokyu train, but I used to take a JR train instead of one of the Metro trains. Each different train line is owned by a different company, and those companies usually have various other holdings and corporate alliances, which means that each has their own set of advertising, and their own silent in-train television line-up. The television programs mainly consist of ads for places to go by train, or for concerns owned by the company. For instance, the Tokyu line (featuring TOQ-Vision) always features lots of ads for the worn-out Broadway musicals being trotted out at their theaters. There are innumerable other ads and commercial spots as well.
The best are the trivia-related ones. I never know what (if anything) they are selling, but I do learn useless facts, and I learn something about my reading speed relative to the average Japanese person’s, as well. The JR line runs a “60-second seminar,” in which old-school NES-style Mario busts open blocks of worthless knowledge for you. I can read about 2/3 of the text in time, so I usually have to skim to the end to get my fact nuggets.
There are also 60-second English lessons that pop up every now and again. They are often completely mistaken, at least when it comes to American English. One I read stated that, “Whether it’s a banana, a peach, or a watermelon, the outside of a fruit is called a ‘peel.’” I know I’ve never heard anyone refer to a ‘watermelon peel’ in my life.
A very famous series of Japanese commercials is also devoted to trivia, and I want to introduce it to anyone who isn’t already familiar.
The Japanese word for ‘trivia’ is 豆知識, which literally means “bean knowledge.” The idea is that trivia consists of little individual nuggets of information that resemble beans. Thus, trivia is used to sell beans themselves. The “Mameshiba,” a variety of adorable little bean-dog creatures, were created to move beans, disseminate random facts, and ruin people’s days. Here you can see all the Mameshiba commercials with English translation.
Introducing Toby, the World’s Most Overdetermined Flying Squirrel!
06 May 2012 2 Comments
in Performances, Photos, Win
I’ve had that past week off for Golden Week, which is a week-long holiday for the whole country. It’s been lovely. It’s rained almost every day, so I’ve mostly kept to the house doing research and work at a leisurely pace. I weeded half the garden and slept in some days.
Last Sunday, however, was a beautiful day. I learned through facebook that the Tokyo Rainbow Pride festival was being held in the Yoyogi/Harajuku area. I lived briefly in Yoyogi, and that area’s practically in my back yard today. I decided to head down and check it out.
I haven’t been to any other Pride events, so I’ll leave the serious evaluation of the event itself to those who are more qualified to comment. The general consensus seemed to be that the organization could have been better, but I believe this was the first year that this particular festival had been held. There used to be some other Pride event, but now there isn’t. Or something.
I’d prefer to focus on the bits that really stood out to me as funny or interesting.
First, it should be mentioned that the Japanese-foreigner split was about 50-50. Some people said that this was a good showing for the Japanese, but in a country where there aren’t many foreigners, it seemed a bit of a shame. But on a positive note, the male-female split was also about 50-50 and not as male-dominated as I would have expected. So much for demographics.
The mascot was a rainbow-colored flying squirrel named Toby. The name comes from a form of the Japanese verb tobu, meaning “to fly,” and the English “to be,” as in, to be just as one is. Some people liked the thoughtful multi-level wordplay; I personally found it a little much. Or maybe it’s just how ugly the little critter is.
The event was emceed by a pair of drag queens, one of whom did most of the talking. I don’t pretend to know who they are, but I can certainly state that it was the first time in my life I had ever been bored by drag queens. I had forgotten that most events Japan must absolutely begin with a boring speech on somebody’s part. Seems like a terrible waste of a fabulous queen, though. I saw her later up close and was truly impressed at her poise on huge platforms as she navigated uneven pavement. And she was in those damn shoes all day.
My favorite booth in the park was the one entitled “Gay End.” They are apparently a company that specializes in funerary goods for the LGBT community, so that you can be “true to yourself in death as in life.” I have no idea what gay funeral goods really are, since I didn’t approach the booth too closely for fear of getting roped into signing up for a headstone raffle or something. I did see, however, that they seemed to be pushing sweet little urns with pictures of dogs and cats on them. Undoubtedly you can have them personalized.
Of course the performances were of particular interest to me. First up was a foreigner burlesque act (female). The Alice in Wonderland theme was cute, but the act was neither polished nor professional. Next, there was a goth drag burlesque act by an extremely tall and somewhat awkward queen. (She appeared later in the day in stilts!) Then, there was a long presentation by a deaf group. The deaf group had their own booth, and a strong presence at the festival. My friends and I got bored and wandered off. There were a number of booths (though perhaps not as many as you’d expect), and there was lots of unhealthy festival food.
The parade included a number of somewhat lackluster floats, including one devoted to the Youtube sensation NyanCat. Guess where all the foreigners were? There was also a section of the parade where people who didn’t want their photos taken could march. It seems a bit strange to take part in a public event and forbid photography, but there you have it. A Hawaiian singer who performed later also forbade photography or video of her act.
I have no idea what the hell this little onion-headed thing is. Nobody else seemed to get it, either.
Some very interesting people showed up, of course. Not only was the drag queen presence strong…
But some chubby, scantily-clad Pokemon showed up!
This samurai showed up, possibly to emphasize the long history of male-male sexual relationships in Japan’s samurai tradition, possibly to just be the most badass dude ever.
My friends and I spent some time arguing over what the hell this was supposed to be when she was getting pictures taken nearby. Some girls explained to me that this is ebi furai, representing a big old tempura prawn! Pretty amazing.
The event was brought to a close with performances by three dance troupes. A jazz-dance type group did the kind of thing I spend every Friday night trying to learn how to do, only they looked a whole lot better doing it.
A Latin dance group did a fierce routine that included the Pink Panther song. I’m sure the Pink Panther song has an actual name. I do not know it.
An Australian dance team turned out a great performance that was both ballroom-inflected and very modern. These three groups, as well as the Okinawan drum group that performed earlier, were the highlight of the performances.
A few burlesques followed, which were all right, but none of them could touch my girl Cherry Typhoon. Then there was a drag queen pageant while the emcee tried to stall for time so that the projector could be set up, or something like that. They were attempting to screen Hamasaki Ayumi’s music video, “How Beautiful You Are” from her new album, “Party Queen.” Unfortunately, they obviously hadn’t tried it out beforehand. It wasn’t dark and the projector was not being set up by experts, so when they did finally show the video, it was absolutely impossible to make it out. Most of the revelers had wandered home by then, anyway. My group departed after the failure, but everyone was in good spirits. It’s done nothing but rain all spring, so getting out of the house and going to such a fun, if not entirely perfect, event, was a perfect way to kick off my Golden Week. I’m really glad I went out, too, because although the forecast told me the whole week would be fun in the sun, it’s rained almost every day since! At the time I started writing this very post, it was hailing!
Us Vs. Them
26 Apr 2012 4 Comments
I gripe a good deal on this blog about the things that annoy me in this country. The gripes find a home here for a couple of reasons. One is catharsis. Venting about train platform texting keeps me from pushing some hapless young idiot out in front of the 9:14 special express. The other is that complaining is often more entertaining than anything else. I believe this is because suffering is universal, whereas joys can be very particular. I may be delighted on the way home every afternoon by the rhododendrons and apple blossoms my neighborhood is currently offering up as a consolation for the scattered cherry blossoms, but I’m neither a good enough photographer nor wordsmith to transmit that joy to my audience. Besides, I’m very fond of the literary alchemy that turns annoyance, anger, or embarrassment into laughter.
Bitching about one’s host country has been the expatriate pastime of choice throughout the ages. It doesn’t matter how great that country is or how much the complaining foreigners want to be there. It’s not home, damn it. No matter what you do, living in a foreign country isn’t easy. You can never be totally sure of yourself, you can never be entirely certain of what to expect. You’re constantly embarrassing yourself. It’s exhausting. Complaints also form part of the glue that holds our community together. The Anglophones with whom I interact in this country, and on this blog, may all be from different parts of the world, but at the very least we can agree that mayonnaise does not go on pizza, and Santa Claus should not be the mascot for a sex hotel.
We feel a certain right to complain, as an oppressed minority. Sure, Japan’s a comfortable place to live without much danger even to those of us who are different, but we all know we don’t fit in here. We get into fights with restaurant management who claim we had 12 people for the all-you-can-eat dinner when we really had 11. We get told a certain club is closed when we can hear music thudding inside. We get stopped by strangers at the grocery store and asked to explain our national-ethnic backgrounds. We fall under the suspicion of police as bicycle thieves. Of course, there are many privileges as well, but we tend to accept those as our due and only remember that we are outnumbered by the people who blend into and navigate this society more skillfully than we. We feel we have earned the right to complain.
I don’t begrudge anybody their complaints, but there is always a point at which even my own complaining bothers me. I tend to notice this tipping point especially when I am talking to people who have not been to Japan, or expatriates who do not speak Japanese or mingle with Japanese people. I might be relating one of my favorite anecdotes, the way I do on this blog. Perhaps the other person is laughing along with me. Then one of us (and sometimes it is me), wonders, “Why are they so obsessed with X?” “What makes the Japanese so weird?” “Why can’t they just Z?”
“They.” I particularly dislike it when I hear these words ringing in my ears in my own voice. I end up reinforcing the distinction that I try to overcome here every day. My complaints can reinforce the stereotypes from the very skewed media portrait of Japan that we receive in America. Japanese people are not crazy on some ethnic or national level. Japan is not a crazy place. It is a different place. It is a place where those of us who are foreign will probably always be fish out of water. But it is not a place deserving of nothing but scorn and ridicule. It is a place where I have received kindness, great and small, from many strangers, even when I did not speak the language well. These kindnesses have always far outweighed the slights.
This is not to say that I intend to give up complaining. A guy engrossed in his phone nearly knocked me off the platform this morning, and I swear, if I’d had a hammer, I would’ve redesigned that touchscreen for him. The other day, one of those fierce little old ladies bodily shoved me off a train I had just barely managed to catch and had already boarded. Sometimes I think every time a little old lady here does something mean, she shrinks and inch but gains the victim’s strength. The ones that look like nothing more than a bucket hat on top of a pair of orthopedic shoes are the ones you’d really better watch out for. But it was also a little old lady, three years ago, who was the very first one in my neighborhood to speak to me like I was no different from anybody else.
“Do you know where the blankets are?” she asked. I could have hugged her.
Trashed
25 Apr 2012 3 Comments
in Fail
One thing that will always make me feel like a foreigner in Japan is the set of Byzantine trash regulations that hound my every move. At this point in my life, I’ve spent nearly two years living in Japan, yet the finer points of the garbage system still elude me.
I should’ve known I was doomed to failure when I first observed Japanese people negotiating their own trash rules. At 18, I was with friends in a Japanese fast food restaurant. We saw that there were two trash cans, each with a drawing representing what we were meant to put inside them. Having had no experience with the Japanese methods of separating trash, we had no guess what the categories were. As far as we could see, one can was for hamburgers and crumpled paper, and one was for flying saucers. We decided to watch and see what the Japanese people did.
The first person walked up, divided his garbage about evenly (and as far as we could tell, arbitrarily) in two and dumped half in each can. The second walked up and dumped all his garbage in one can. The third walked up and dumped everything, including the plastic tray in the can and walked away. Not helpful.
When I came to live here long term, I first learned the finer points of garbage separation. Twice a week, the city picks up “burnable garbage.” You must wake up early in the morning to put your garbage out rather than taking it out at night, to prevent attracting animals and the hateful gaze of busybody old ladies. There are no garbage cans, so if you forget to put your garbage out on Thursday, it will continue stinking up your house until Monday. Recyclables are picked up on specific days and must be completely separated and packaged appropriately. Paper is tied up in neat little stacks with ribbon, glass and plastic are disposed separately in their own ways. I presume that non-recyclable metals and other objects are picked up on days of solar eclipse and meteor showers. Large trash is picked up once a month, if the garbagemen feel up to the task. To throw out a television, you must personally bring it to the dump and pay a fee, I’m told. To throw away batteries you must guess the name of Rumplestiltskin’s Japanese cousin or pledge your first-born child.
Nobody gave me a handbook when I moved in this time, and the posted garbage rules at our complex are all faded, so I only know when the burnable garbage day is. I can’t depend upon any information from my useless French landlord, and the custodian seemed embarrassed when I so much as asked him where to put the garbage on my first week. This leaves me two options, and I use them both.
The first is to slowly sneak forbidden garbage into the burnable garbage. I’m sure that the garbage police will see this blog and come to take me away in the morning, and they probably have good reason. I’m sure it causes trouble for someone when I sneak a used razorblade or the metal tag from a button-down shirt into the burnable garbage, and I do feel sorry about that. But I’m more than certain that I’m not the only one who does it, and the effort on my part to avoid it is probably more than the effort on their part to sweep the metal out of the ashes and send it wherever it belongs. But my sincerest public apologies to Mr. Garbage Burner Guy.
The second option is the one I deploy for recyclables: sneaking out in the dead of night and depositing the goods in a bin at a convenience store. Cans are easy, since there are always can recycle bins near vending machines, and no one much cares if the cans you put in there don’t come from that particular machine. Usually on my way to the store, I take a plastic bag full of any cans that have been laying around, and pop them all in there one by one.
Bottles, broken glass, and the like are a lot harder. There are no public trashcans for general garbage anywhere that I know of. Convenience stores have cans for various recyclables out front, but they’re all printed with a sweet little message reminding you that they don’t want your nasty-ass trash from home. Strolling up and depositing your own recyclables would attract disapproving glances from the neighbors. A Japanese friend recommended going inside the convenience store, purchasing something, and then coming out and disposing of the unrelated garbage from home, but as a foreigner, I try to be a good representative. Also, throwing out a huge empty champagne bottle at the convenience store is not terribly convincing.
The supermarket also has recycle stations, but only for specific goods like plastic two-liter bottles and the styrofoam that meat comes on, and woe betide you if you didn’t wash everything properly and remove the labels just so.
So to avoid the judgmental eyes of contrary old biddies, it is sometimes most expedient to sneak out as late as possible with your recyclables and find a place to dispose of them then. I carry out my garbage ninja missions under cover of darkness, flitting unseen from shadow to shadow, sorting like the wind. They will never catch me alive. But if they do, I will pretend not to speak Japanese.
Spring Slideshow
19 Apr 2012 Leave a Comment
I hate taking photos, but I hate organizing them even more, so here is a springtime photovomit for you all. You may organize them in your own minds as you see fit.
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Please enjoy some brief video as well:
One Long Saturday
19 Apr 2012 Leave a Comment
in Win
Last Saturday was one of those perfect days formed from a string of weird and meaningless events mixed with good company, minor discomforts, and Japan’s uniquely invigorating spring atmosphere.
After hosting my hanami party the week before, I was a bit behind in my work, but spring is fleeting, and the cherry blossoms have an even shorter lifespan, so I felt compelled to accept when a friend of mine invited me out to Narita for a taiko festival. I love the big, stomach-thumping percussion, even if it is criticized for being faux-historical, so I couldn’t resist.
I went out to meet my friend in Murakami, his town, which is near where I used to live and teach in Chiba Prefecture. It takes a good hour and twenty minutes (and four trains) to get out that far,but I brought some reading. Unfortunately, I underestimated the wind and the change in temperature between Tokyo and points east that day, so by the time I reached Murakami I was already cold and wishing I’d worn a scarf and some stockings. But no matter, my friend picked me up and we headed the rest of the way to Narita by car.
Along the way, he told me that the local specialty was eel and stopped at a restaurant that’s famous for its rendition of the dish. I like eel now and again, and since I hadn’t had it for three years, I was overdue. Even though it was packed, we decided to wait. He parked the car in a parking spot that was evidently not a parking spot but a place to wait for a parking spot (I don’t understand it, either), and we went and got a number from the restaurant, then went for a walk amongst the last of the cherry blossoms.
It’s been a windy, rainy spring, so after only about a week and a half, the cherry blossoms were about half gone, but there’s something particularly beautiful about the pink blossoms against the young green leaves, as well. The pink and yellow-green color combination was once a favorite in kimono fashion, I understand. We talked about how eels are caught and raised and the skyrocketing price of the delicacy, then we walked back toward the restaurant.
Just as we got to the parking lot, someone was pulling into a parking space, which our car had been in line for. My friend got into an argument with the driver, some other nosy old lady inserting herself into the process as well. Apologies were demanded on both sides, but I don’t think either got one. The older man eventually surrendered the spot and we pulled in and had our lunch, seated with an older couple who studiously ignored us. Their meal came in fancier boxes than ours, which meant they had paid more, but I couldn’t see much difference. The eel was delicious.
Then it was off to Narita. I mentioned to my friend how nostalgic the trip had been for me. I passed by all the towns I used to pass through coming to visit Tokyo when I lived in Chiba. The train even stopped at stations nearer and dearer to my heart, like the one with the mall where I used to go shopping, or the one I used to go to once a week to teach English. These suburban train stops are nothing special. The “Singing AEON” shopping mall still has its logo over a big, dumb picture of lima beans, and all the bowling centers and pachinko parlors still send their neon lights beaming over the nondescript pre-fabricated houses. I realized that that these stupid, meaningless suburban sights will be special to me for the rest of my life, because they once meant home.
I also mentioned that Narita had a particular nostalgic association for me because it was where I first spent the night in Japan, eight years ago. I had immediately flashed back to leading the girls’ charge on the shared bath at the ryokan, and how heavenly the steaming hot water was after the long trip, and how quickly everyone’s shyness had faded. Hundreds of other memories from that trip were also at the back of my mind, particularly young women riding on enormous Taiko drums in a festival up north, playing them as they went. I hoped we’d see something equally impressive today. My friend asked me where it was I’d stayed in Narita and I confessed that I didn’t remember. It was eight years ago, and I was disoriented with the novelty of absolutely everything in the old-fashioned touristy town. He asked me if it was at the top of the slope or the bottom, and I said I thought the bottom, but I really wasn’t sure.
We parked and started walking toward the station, already hearing a bit of thumping and piping in the distance. We had a pee at the McDonald’s, then waited near the beginning of the parade route for some of my friend’s friends. They showed up with a baby that belonged to one woman, and I guess the man was that woman’s husband, and then there was a second woman. My friend didn’t know the couple well, so there were some explanations of just who the hell they were, then we alternated between watching the parade and watching behind us where some new JR mascot was being unveiled. A dog in a station-master’s uniform, its head and feet were so enormous that it looked drunk as it climbed the stairs with the help of two attendants. As for the parade, we could barely see anything, but we could feel the drumbeats in our cores.
I assured the newcomers that I could speak Japanese, allaying their fears that I would be an English pop-quiz personified. They took the toddler to get some stickers from the drunken dog, which left him elated for the rest of the day. We watched the parade for a little while before the single woman tapped me on the arm. “Justine,” she broached (in Japanese), “Where do you come from?”
“Washington, D.C.,” I answered.
She gave an excited hop and pounded the daddy on the back. “She says America!” she announced brightly. When I gave her a puzzled look, she smiled and explained, “You’re so white that we were just trying to guess where you came from. He said America, she said Canada, and I said Europe!”
I never know how to respond to comments about my whiteness, so I just smiled and offered, “Well, I’m from America, but my family is of German descent, so…” That way two of them could be right. They nodded vigorously, recalling that Americans are never just American, which I guess seems odd to Japanese.
We decided to avoid the crowds and walk down some back streets to get to the temple, and through the grounds past the sacred turtles to the bottom of the hill where the parade was to end. Along the way, my friend clowned around for the kid, who was keen on showing me the prizes he got from the stationmaster dog and emphasizing the difference in their size. Yes, I agreed with him, the notebook was big and the stickers were small. We gave directions to a pair of older ladies who were constantly getting lost trying to find their parking lot. Several times we turned around to help them. As I walked along, agreeing with a toddler’s nonsense, accepted in a member of this group, helping the old ladies, watching my friend clown around, wearing clothes that I liked, with a fresh haircut in the quiet residential alleys of this sentimentally significant town, I felt incredibly buoyant. Freezing, but buoyant.
We went to see the turtles. The girls said the turtles made them feel gross. My friend had said the same thing earlier to me when I mentioned the turtles. I said I never thought of turtles as gross, but he said too many of anything was creepy. We watched the parade just outside the temple gates for a while. We couldn’t see much of anything except when floats passed by, or when the percussionists leaped in the air. But it was lovely. It turned out that we had missed most of the parade, because we were at the end point, not a point where most of the groups passed through. I didn’t care.
My friend leaned over and asked me again about where I’d stayed. Was it near here? We were at the bottom of the hill now, which I had said was kinda maybe possibly where I’d stayed eight years back. I craned my neck and looked around. A crowd, some traditional shops. A weird tower up one hill that looked familiar. Then I looked across the street a the sign on a building. The ryokan I’d stayed at was ‘Something Pine,’ I could remember that much. But that wasn’t much. But as I read the sign, I blinked. ‘Ryokan Wakamatsu,’ it said. I pointed at it. “There. I stayed there,” I announced. Even I wondered if I wasn’t just lying to avoid embarrassment, but sure enough, that was the damn place right there. We went in later to double-check, and the lobby was just like I remembered it. I was glowing with the pleasure of serendipity.
Other stuff happened that was less significant. The rest of our group decided to go and get some tea, but my friend had to meet someone about some business matter. I stuck with him, the rest headed off. We promised to meet up with them later. Didn’t.
My friend went for his meeting with his acquaintance, a maker of gelato. The berry flavor was maybe the best gelato I’ve had in years, but I was already cold and the sun was going down, so by the time I finished the gelato, I was shivering cold. My friend gave me his hat to stick my hands in. When he finished his, he got the hat. The gelato guy gave us some warm milk while he kept us waiting. It was one of those odd situations where even Japanese aren’t sure what’s going on or who is waiting on whom. Eventually they got their business sorted out and we headed back to the car, then got dinner. I got home at about bedtime but took a shower anyway. I was thoroughly worn out from the day’s jumble of events. Although each random scene seemed in retrospect to have no particular connection or reason for being, at the end of the day I was left with the impression of having acquired a collection of small, precious, connected items, like a string of pearls, or a shoebox full of old family photographs.
