Something to Talk About

In another week or so, I'll be halfway through my stay in Japan. (In case you haven't heard, I extended my contract another year, so I'm going to stay at the medical school until August of 2008.) Over the next couple of days, things are going to change a bit. Tyler is leaving Ehime and the new teacher is coming sometime next week. Of course I'm excited to meet the new teacher, but also a little sad to see Tyler go -- it's been fun working together and nice to hang out with someone who shares my love for karaoke. :D

Let's get one thing straight, though -- although Tyler and I get along well, contrary to popular belief, we're not married, dating or otherwise bound by vows of eternal gaijin love. Despite this, I think we've both become resigned to the fact that everyone in Toon city thinks we're married. The softball men, the shinto priest, and various other people in my neighborhood have asked me how my husband is doing so many times that I've lost count. And yesterday, at dinner with two of our students (both exchange students from China), I realized that the medical students also appear to think that we're a couple.

Student 1: So you want to learn Chinese?

Me: Oh yes, please teach me!

Student 2: Ok. Do you know any words already?

Me: Well....I can say 你好 (hello) and 我愛你 (I love you.)

Student 1: Ooooo, you can say 我愛你??? Good! Now say it to Tyler!! (The two students look at each other and giggle. wink wink. nudge nudge.)

Tyler and Me: ???

Student 1: We've actually been wondering if you two have any good stories to tell us.

Me: Stories?

Student 1: Yeah, like...you know...stories about the two of you...together....

Me: haha. I don't think I could tell you anything very interesting.

Student 1: Oh....so you mean he didn't propose to you???

Tyler and Me: ...


Really, it doesn't bother me that everyone here thinks I'm married to Tyler. I actually find it quite entertaining. But I do wonder what will happen when the new teacher comes, as he just so happens to be male. I can only imagine the scandal. It'll probably make the front page. (TROUBLE IN PARADISE??? GAIJIN LOVE TRIANGLE IN TOON CITY.)

Yikes...who knew I would get married, divorced, and remarried in just one short year.

Festival Day II

The softball team invited me back yesterday for the second day of the Obon festival. Here's a quick summary of what went down:

Number of boxes of kleenex won: 0 (The two day total stands at 21. Not too shabby.)

Number of goldfish I managed to catch at the goldfish carnival game: 0 (Very poor showing...wish I could have better represented my country....)

Number of goldfish the softball team gave me to take home anyway: 9 :D

Number of days the goldfish lived in a pot in my kitchen because I didn't have a better container to put them in: 0.5 (I bought a small aquarium for them today. Hopefully they're happier now.)

Number of reporters from the Ehime prefectural newspaper who came to interview me for some kind of human interest article: 1 (笑)

Probability that I will become an international celebrity before I leave Japan: 0.5 (and rising rapidly with all this extra publicity I'm getting ;)

Number of public baths visited last night: 1 (That makes a total of two visits in the last two days. The people who work the night shift at the bath recognize my face now. I am thinking of moving out of my apartment and into the bath. I seriously could live there if I wanted to. The bath is open twenty-four hours with a restaurant, a room with comfy looking recliners, air conditioner and of course, a bath. If only it were in biking distance of work...)

Octopus Balls and Tired Feet

The last week or so, I've been waking up really early, probably because my apartment faces east and gets like an oven as soon as the sun comes up. Yesterday, I woke up at about 5:30....which doesn't fit my theory at all since the sky still looked like this:


Anyway, for whatever reason, I woke up at 5:30 and couldn't go back to sleep. And so began a very long day of randomness.

Monday through Wednesday of this week are a Japanese holiday called Obon. During Obon, people believe that the souls of their ancestors come back to earth for a few days. Many people go back to their parent's house, eat special food, and visit their family's grave to honor their ancestors. (I tried to ask where my grandma's soul would go. Do the souls of non-Japanese people or Japanese-American people come back to earth too? Would my grandma's soul come back to her grave in Seattle? To her house? To her relatives' house in Okinawa? Nobody really seemed to know. Anyway, it was interesting to think about it.)

Many towns also have festivals for Obon with food and traditional dancing, and in my town, the festival's organizational committee happens to be run by.......my softball team! One of the softball men called me yesterday afternoon and asked if I would make food at one of the booths, so I rode my bike over to the festival to help out.

In the middle of this little park, they had set up this tower thing with a drum inside:


and tents with grills and deep-fryers to make soba noodles, fried chicken, french fries, udon, and octopus balls.


I was given my very own apron and towel and recruited to work at the octopus ball grill where I greased grills, poured batter, sprinkled cabbage and bits of octopus, and turned balls for three hours. It was fun to learn something new, but reeeallly hot behind the grill.

Meanwhile, lots of people from town came to the festival dressed in yukatas (a kind of light summer kimono) and danced in a circle around the tower like this:


Sorry, I'll have to work on my taking-pictures-in-the-dark skills, but oh well. The blurriness gives it character. :)

After the festival, there were some raffle prizes leftover so the whole kitchen staff was invited to draw tickets. Curiously, everyone drew prize number 4, which happened to be three boxes of tissues, and on top of that, everyone decided to give their tissues to me. I'm pretty sure that unless I catch pneumonia and am sick in bed every day until I leave Japan, I won't use 21 boxes of kleenex by myself, but they insisted on giving them to me so I graciously accepted them. :D

After the raffle, we grabbed some udon:

(Me and the first baseman, who gave me an apron from his sake factory.)

and then the softball men went off to the community center to have a post-festival party. We were sitting at the table snacking and chatting when the first baseman and the manager decided they wanted to go to a public bath and invited me to come. On one hand, it was already 11 PM and I had been up since 5:30 that morning, but on the other hand, I was pretty sweaty and greasy from grilling octopus balls, so I decided to take them up on it.

By now, I've gotten over the weirdness of bathing naked with a bunch of people I've never seen before, but I still don't quite understand the social side of the public bath thing -- lots of people go to the bath with friends or their family for fun, but of course, men and women have separate baths so they can't really hang out together. It doesn't seem like the best way to have a group outing. At any rate, last night, the two softball men went to their bath, I went to mine, soaked for awhile and met up again an hour later. The water felt really nice after standing in the hot octopus ball booth all day. I guess last night's bath was less about bonding and more about sweaty, tired feet. That was cool with me.

Art

This is a self portrait of Mai, one of the girls who I teach on Friday. She's 11 and wants to be a comic book artist when she grows up.



Yurie (12 or 13, I think) drew this picture during class a few weeks ago. Apparently this is what I look like during the lesson. :)



Actually, this one isn't from my students. It's from Maiko, my dad's cousin's daughter who lives in Okinawa. She drew a shisa, a traditional Okinawa guard dog-lion thing that is supposed to keep bad luck away from your house. It says, "To Big Sister Lindsay. This is a happy shisa. Don't you think so? From Mai Nakamura." There's kind of a Japanese pun in there that I can't translate, but it's very cute.

デンジャラス・ジャパン

Summer in Japan is not for the faint of heart -- an assortment of perils lurk right outside my apartment door. Today, I stepped outside my apartment, and after a thirty second walk down the stairs to my bike, I was already dripping with sweat. By the time I arrived at work five minutes later, I had a rather unattractive stain down the front of my shirt. Ugh.

It is really hot here.

Along with the recent heat wave, the two flights of stairs up to my apartment have suddenly become quite perilous. Since the exterior of my apartment building is bright yellow and brightly lit, every night, every single bug in the whole city comes flocking towards my building. When I come back to my apartment at night, I have to duck and dodge various critters, most of which are at least twice as big as any bug I have ever seen in Washington. Sometimes I feel like I'm living inside a video game:

Level One: Duck the spider webs on the first flight of stairs, and be sure to jump over the two gigantic beetles patrolling the second story landing. Don't let them spear you with their fearsome antennae and eat you, or you'll lose one life and be sent back to start.

(This one is actually one of the smaller beetles. I dropped my keys right next to him and dreaded picking them up, but fortunately, he was a rather sluggish type so I was able to retrieve my keys unscathed and pass on to Level 2.)

Level Two: The second set of stairs are relatively easy to negotiate, but beware of the occasional spider webs and purple lizards climbing up the walls. The lizards won't hurt you, but they can sure freak you out if they jump onto your head.

Level Three: On the third floor, keep low and time your dash to your apartment door carefully to avoid being dive-bombed by small birds which fly back and forth across the walkway frantically trying to find a way out of the netting that surrounds the apartment. When you reach your door, open and close it as quickly as possible to avoid letting in any unwanted guests.

***Should an unwanted guest enter your apartment, (e.g. a gigantic green bug with wings) nervously watch it fly circles around your light fixture, try to ignore it for half an hour, and finally trap it in a cup and take it outside in order to avoid accidentally inhaling it in your sleep.

----

Two Sundays ago, I discovered yet another peril of living in an old apartment in the heat of the Japanese summer. I had been working in the next city every night from Thursday to Sunday, so I had been eating out and hadn't used any of my kitchen appliances for almost a week. When I came home on Sunday night, I opened the refrigerator and was greeted by the most disgusting odor I have ever smelled in my life.

My ancient refrigerator had succumbed to the heat and quit working at a very inopportune time. In the sweltering heat, the leftover noodles, frozen hamburger, and the veggies in the crisper did not fare too well, and there was black mold everywhere. Fortunately, I eventually managed to clean out the fridge and freezer without dying from the fumes. The mold was pretty terrifying, though.

After a week with no fridge at all, my office ordered a new fridge and sent it to my apartment on Monday. It is hands down the most beautiful fridge I have ever seen in my life. Big, clean and cold inside. I love it. If it were human, I would marry it.

On a completely unrelated note, I have just noticed that the brand name of the new fridge is "it's," the brand name of my microwave is "Love and Rest," and the brand name of my toilet paper is "Mrs. Wisely."

Career Change

I think I'm going to give up this medical school business after all. Or maybe become like Patch Adams or something....because I swear that by the time I leave Japan, I will have become some type of celebrity.

I was walking down the street in Matsuyama with a friend the other day, when a man came up to us and asked if he could take a picture for a magazine. A picture? Of me? For a magazine? Surely, I must not understand his Japanese, I thought, but since we had nothing to do that day, we had our picture taken and went off to karaoke.

I forgot all about it until three or four weeks later. This medical student, who I had never met before, came up to me in the hallway at school and said in an excited whisper, "Town Jouhou!! Town Jouhou!!" (Town Information! Town Information!) She was looking me straight in the eye with this huge smile like she expected me to understand exactly what she was talking about, but I had no idea. Finally, I asked her what was up, and she told me that she had seen a picture of me in the Matsuyama Town Information magazine. In the next few days, a whole bunch of random people -- medical students, secretaries, one of my bosses -- showed me the magazine, so I guess it's a pretty widely read publication and my beautiful picture must be all over Matsuyama by now. Perhaps I will become a model.

(Click on it to enlarge it.)

...Or perhaps I will become a pop star after all. One of my students brought me a flier about another American Idolish singing contest the other day. This one is a little bit smaller than the last one and probably won't lead to any big television appearances, but I figure I have to work on my publicity in any way that I can. ;) I sang in the preliminary round of the contest the other day, and found a postcard in my mailbox on Friday saying that I made the first cut, so in two weeks, I'll be singing at the semi-final during a festival in the middle of downtown Matsuyama. Watch out Kelly Clarkson! Watch out Clay!!

Oh, yeah. I was on TV again the other day when our jazz band's concert was locally televised. You can check out video of my guest vocal appearance here if you like. :) I was pretty nervous singing with a big band for the first time but didn't do too bad....except for a little part at the end when I ran out of air and was dying...and the part after I finished singing when I wasn't sure whether I was supposed to leave the stage. I kind of looked at the emcee and bowed a bunch of times because I wasn't sure what to do. It sorta looks like I was doing an impression of the bowing lady from the contest at the end of the Sound of Music (>_<);;

Back

Hi!!! How have you been? Have you been taking your vitamins? Sleeping 8 hours a night? Eating breakfast?? Doing your homework??? I hope you're all doing well! Don't be fooled by the lack of blog posts -- I'm still alive* and enjoying myself in Japan. :D

For the past month and a half, I've been all over the place. I went to Kyoto, Himeji, Oita, Hiroshima, Ehime, Okinawa, and Nara with my family, and then to South Korea with my friend, Chris. After that came another round of essays for medical school applications, and then the final exam for the medical English class. The time has flown by so fast that sometimes it seems like there's hardly been time to think, let alone write blog entries. Things never get boring, though, and hopefully life will stay that way. :D Anyway, on to my (very disjointed) impressions of the last few weeks...

My family came to Japan in the end of June, and in the middle of their trip, we all went to the Peace Memorial Museum in Hiroshima. Even though it was my third time at the museum, it was still quite intense. Inside are a variety of exhibits about the atom bomb victims: a lunch box full of charred food that a junior high school girl never got to eat because she was incinerated by the heat from the bomb, a drawing of a husband peering helplessly through the ruins of his burning house at his wife who is stuck inside, a picture of a man so badly burnt that his face, back and legs are completely covered with blisters/charred skin(??). Really awful stuff.

In South Korea a few weeks later, Chris and I went to another museum where I saw more of the same. This museum was about the prisons that the imperialist Japanese army ran while it occupied Korea from the early 1900's until World War II. I had known that the Japanese army committed war crimes in Korea and China, but the museum was still pretty shocking. There were lots of really graphic displays showing how Koreans who protested against the occupation government were thrown into jail and tortured in all sorts of despicable ways. What struck me the most was that the tortured Koreans in the pictures looked just as awful as the a-bomb victims in Hiroshima. There's really not much difference between a back covered with blisters and a back covered with long gashes from a whip. Different means of violence, but the same horrible result, at least on the level of the individual victims.

All of these awful, awful pictures were, of course, depressing and left me thinking some pretty dark thoughts. How can human beings do such horrible things to each other? But throughout the rest of the trip, people did so many kind and good things for my family and me that it was difficult for me to be pessimistic for long. While this blog is not exactly the best place to make any big claims about the goodness of human nature, I have found lots of reasons to be optimistic. Here they are in no particular order:

-- Chris's friend Jin, who let us stay in her apartment even though I had never met her before. She was a fabulous host and showed Chris and me all around Seoul in between studying for her midterms and working at her part-time job.

-- the Korean guy sitting next to me on the plane back to Korea, who realized that I couldn't eat my sandwich because there were nuts inside and kindly offered me his yogurt. :)

-- my friends in Kyoto. My folks came to Kyoto on a Friday night, but my ferry arrived there much earlier that morning. I thought I would call up some of my friends in Kyoto to see if they could meet, but figured that it might not work out since they have classes on Fridays. Surprisingly enough, they all managed to reschedule somehow or other and took me out to lunch, dinner, and fireworks. One of my friends had a test in Osaka in the morning and her part-time job in Kobe in the afternoon, but still took the forty-five minute train ride out to Kyoto to meet up with us for an hour or so before running back to Kobe. Talk about going out of your way!

-- all of the Japanese relatives. In Oita, my dad's aunt Toshiko reserved our hotel for us, took us around in taxis to the best restaurants she could find, and fed us until I thought I was going to burst. :)


Our relatives in Okinawa were equally hospitable. My dad's aunt rented the biggest van I have ever seen, and her son, Dai, chauffeured us all over the island for the whole weekend.

(They also covered us with a tiny umbrella to make sure we didn't get sun burnt.)

-- the people of my town. Four of my lady students invited us over to one of their houses for lunch. They had mentioned that they would prepare some sort of light lunch, but I should have known better. When we got to the house, we found an absolutely gigantic spread of salad, okonomiyaki (a Japanese style pancake kind of thing), sausages, rice balls, cake, Japanese sweets, and several other dishes. It was delicious, but certainly not a light lunch.


That night, the softball men had a welcome party for my family. They started by driving us out to the first baseman's sake factory for a tour, and even enlisted an interpreter to come along and help explain things. After the sake factory, they ushered us over to the local shrine where more softball men and the Shinto priest/piano player were waiting to receive us. At the shrine, they had arranged for a shakuhachi (Japanese flute) and koto (Japanese stringed instrument) concert:


and a performance of shishimai, a traditional dragon dance:


We watched the show from the seats of honor, well-supplied with tea and mosquito repellent.


Then we set off to a restaurant for dinner. At the door of the restaurant, the softball men gave all of us happi (traditional Japanese summer jackets) and had us participate in a traditional welcome party ceremony where you break the top of a sake keg with big wooden hammers.


Dinner was huge and delicious, (in hindsight, I guess I shouldn't have scheduled lunch with my students and the softball team's party on the same day, because we were all quite full) and in the middle, all sorts of little surprises kept popping up. At one point, the shakuhachi player gave Steven his very own shakuhachi to take back to America. A little bit later, several softball men stood up to make speeches about how happy they were to have us in their town, and then requested that each of us get up and make a speech of our own. And in the middle of the speeches, the mayor of my town entered the restaurant and presented all of us with towels as a gift from the City of Toon. I felt like a diplomat or a movie star or something. It was all pretty great.


-- my family, who came all the way to Japan to see me! I had such a good time seeing you again!!

It's hard to recreate the last few weeks in a blog post, but the general feeling of goodwill and hospitality that I encountered everywhere I went was just incredible. Sometimes, back at work, I have these moments where I remember a funny moment with all the great people I hung out with during the trip and find myself smiling. Ikuko thinks I'm crazy, smiling for no particular reason in front of my computer screen, but I think I'm probably just happy. :)



* Still alive, but covered with mosquito bites. I think a small family of mosquitoes has taken up residence in my apartment.... (>_<);;