Sayonara

High-Fiving Students at the Farewell Ceremony

I love this photo - it’s exactly how I will remember this year - smiley, fun, good-natured students, and friendly, fun and helpful teachers (see the vice-principal on right). I have avoided mentioning the school’s name on this blog so far, but the whole year has been such an overwhelmingly positive experience that I want to mention it now. Thank you, Hokuto High School.

I want to thank everyone at Hokuto High for being such friendly and fantastic people. Even though I was only there for one year, they welcomed me like one of their own. Teachers chatted to me in the photocopier room, at sports days, in the corridors; students shouted “Hello, David!” every time they saw me at school, and ran over to chat whenever they saw me outside school.

The students were humorous and smart, and made me laugh with their work - here’s an example. The comic reads from top to bottom, right to left:

Fat Frog

I also want to thank my friends, who have been great craic all year - here’s a last purikura of the group of 6 I hung out with most.

The Magnificent Six - Purikura

Sayonara, Japan. And thank you.

Kosuge Mura Festival

A taiko player raises his drumstick to the sky as the bonfire flames lick higher.

Taiko player and bonfire

This is my favourite photograph from this weekend’s Kosuge Mura festival. Like all of the other photos in this post, it was taken by a fellow JET and photography graduate, the talented Kelly Bryan.

I was lucky enough to play a yamabushi - a mountain monk - at the festival. Another JET, Clint Peters, was taking part along with 8 locals and managed to get me invited too - thanks Clint! First, we carried big flaming torches down the riverbank, lighting small fires all along both banks:

Me carrying my torch

Then, we each introduced ourselves to the crowd. It was a fantastic feeling to roar out the old Japanese words in a deep, rolling, samurai-style voice. Mine was, roughly translated:
“I am the Irish mountain monk, Dave Cahill. I have come today to give you love.” Yes, just like the Simpsons episode - “I bring you love!”

Anyway, with the introductions over, we set 3 huge bonfires with our torches. Here’s a before and after:

BEFORE (Around 2pm on the day of the festival)

Bonfire - before

AFTER (Around 7pm, i.e. after we went at it with our torches)

Bonfire - after

The heat was like nothing I had ever felt before. The towering flames grew threateningly in the wind, hordes of orange sparks flew through the air, and wave after wave of heat washed over our faces. Standing there in the intense heat of the fire, looking around and smiling at my fellow monks, was definitely a moment to remember.

When the fire died down a little, we waded back across the river to great applause. This is Clint, emerging from the river dripping wet and freezing!

Clint emerges from the river

To finish off the festival, we touched our torches against a pole - at the exact moment we touched the pole, a barrage of fireworks blasted into the sky, capping off another amazing night in Japan.

Broken purikura promises

Damn you, purikura. Every time I fall for the wonderful promises on your curtain booths, and every time my hopes are dashed.

What promises? Let’s just take a sample.

Purikura - Our Dolls In Black
So the DoLLs in black were going to invite me to the monogram dream, huh? Do you know how many nights I sat by the phone, just hoping the dolls would call? I may not know what exactly a “monogram dream” is, but as I have never been invited to anything by a doll, I think it’s safe to say you broke your word on this one.

Purikura - Inferior To No One
Now that’s what I call a promise. 400 yen makes you the most superior being on the entire planet - sweet deal! OK, so in all honesty I didn’t hold out much hope for this one…

Purikura - Lame Pens
“Will bring more brilliant beauty to you, by glittering lame pens and new tools.” How many more lies could you have fit in one sentence, purikura? I became neither brilliant nor beautiful. The glittering pens were not lame, they were actually pretty cool. And there was not a hammer or a drill to be seen.

All of you out there on the interwebs, take heed. Purikura = lies.

What’s in a name?

Here in Japan, I’m often reminded of Butch in Pulp Fiction talking about how American names don’t mean anything. Japanese names are made up of Chinese characters, each of which has a meaning.

I imagine that it must be pretty tough picking names as a Japanese parent - they don’t just need to sound good, they also need to mean something nice. In fairness, I think they interpret meanings a little more loosely than us, though; one of my teachers has a name which translates to English as “Graceful Vegetable”.

Given a non-Japanese name like David, you can work backwards and see what combinations of Chinese characters will fit the sounds in the name. So, Graceful Vegetable and I once tried to find some good characters to fit my name. Unfortunately, the best we could come up with is this:

Deibito

It means: Exit, Well, Person. Roughly: “The person who comes out of the well”. Hmmm. The original Hebrew meaning of David is Beloved, so I think I’ll stick with that.

Sumo

Jacques Chirac may be a fan, but I wasn’t going to sumo for the craic. My motivations were more cultural - I viewed it as kind of a “museum visit”. After all, how much fun could it possibly be to watch two fat guys push each other around?

A hell of a lot, it turns out.

I remember going to watch a rally when I was younger and thinking that the exciting part was when a car crashed or span out, and that didn’t happen enough. The great thing about sumo is that there are no crashless rallies. No goalless draws, no drab stalemates. Technically, if a wrestler touches the ground with anything but his feet, or puts one toe over the straw bales that mark the edge of the dohyo, it’s over. But the dramatic sight of a 150kg man hitting the floor or flying out of the ring (the dohyo) is much more common!

TOKYO - Pre-sumo - L'attaque du sumo francais!

We arrived early at Ryogoku (両国) stadium in Tokyo, and stayed down at the premium seating area for an hour or so, close enough to see every flabby contour of the wrestler’s butts. These early-morning competitors were from the lower ranks, and the owners of the premium seats wouldn’t arrive until much later, when the real wrestlers started.

For us, though, the rapid-fire early matches were a great way to get a feel for how sumo worked before the big matches began. The rough structure is:

1. Staredown.
The wrestlers hunker down and glare at each other to psyche each other out. They may break away and come back a few seconds later to hunker and glare again. Different ranks have different staring time limits - the lower rank matches come in rapid succession because they have almost no staring time, whereas the big matches are drawn out and suspenseful thanks to their longer limit.

Sumo wrestlers staring

2. Wrestling
At some point, the hunker-and-glare breaks into a fight, and they’re off.

Sumo wrestlers in action

As the higher grade wrestlers started to appear, the premium seating gradually filled up, and we went back to our 4,900 yen (€31) upper-tier seats. After some great higher-rank matches, we were treated to the kind of finale you could only dream of. When a yokozuna, a top-ranked wrestler, loses a bout, spectators throw their zabuton (cushions) down at the dohyo. Asashoryu (朝青龍 明徳), probably the most famous yokozuna, came on for the final bout of the day, and lost in spectacular style, sending cushions flying in all directions. Thankfully I caught it on video - Asashoryu is the guy with the black nappy (mawashi). Check it out!

We had an amazing day, and if you’re in Tokyo during a tournament you’d be insane to miss out - you can find details on sumo tournament dates here. All in all, it looks like Mr. Chirac and I have more in common than I realised!

Purikura

That’s the Japanese abbreviation for the insanely popular Print Club (purinto kurabu or プリント倶楽部), photo booths where teenagers go to take pictures of themselves in strange situations.

Aaaanyway, in Yokohama a weekend or two ago, Cha and I gave in and gave it a go - we stabbed the pen at the screen a couple of times and pressed a few buttons, but couldn’t figure out how to draw on the pictures. That aside, here are some for your viewing pleasure:

Purikura

UPDATE: Read more about purikura here: Broken purikura promises.

The Real Moe

Every time I walk down the main street of Kofu, I see the same poster of an insanely smiley politician.

They say Rich Hall is the real Moe Szyslak from the Simpsons, but I’m not sure…

Moe and the politician

A Rubbish Post

One of the first things you notice here is that there are no bins in the streets. You finish an ice cream and wander for hours with the sticky wrapper in your hand, eyes darting, searching for a bin that never appears. Why? Firstly, people don’t often eat in the streets here, but for me, that never explained the total absence of bins. Then I read this brilliant article, and it all made sense.

In Japan, sorting rubbish is big news. The article above does a better job than I ever could of describing it, but suffice to say that my old Irish habits of chucking everything in the one bag just don’t cut it anymore. Here’s a shot of 3 of the sub-categories into which rubbish must be sorted, according to my local rubbish authority:

Rubbish Categories

So I tried to be a good citizen, and keep my burnables far away from my non-burnables, my PET bottles far from my cans, but a while later this letter came through the door of every apartment in my block.

A Friendly Letter

After some fiddling on translation sites and scribbling on the letter, I realised it was something to this effect:

Some miscreant has been placing rubbish bags in the rubbish cage without writing their name on them. If this does not stop, we will be forced to open the bags and sort through the rubbish for personally identifiable material.

Jaysus.

So needless to say, I have been writing my name loud and proud on my bags since. But that wasn’t enough.

Bringing out my neatly labelled rubbish one day, I noticed there were quite a few bags in the rubbish cage. All mine. And all with little yellow notes.

Turns out my decision that plastics should go in the “non-burnable” category was wrong. Plastics, ladies and gentlemen, are burnable, and if you forget that, your rubbish will be left in the cage, covered in illegible yellow notes.

So after a long session rummaging through my last 2 weeks of domestic waste, I was back in compliance.

Then again, my situation is not the worst. I have heard of foreigners who no longer have the right to put their rubbish out for collection at all due to repeated sorting violations, and have to deliver their rubbish direct to the depot and have it checked for sorting errors while they wait.

This is the real reason why there are no bins on the streets here. If there were, do you think people would spend hours sorting their rubbish into several bags by category? Indeed not. Direct to the public bin, do not pass Go, do not collect $200. Here’s a quote from the article above:

In Yokohama, after a few neighborhoods started sorting last year, some residents stopped throwing away their trash at home. Garbage bins at parks and convenience stores began filling up mysteriously with unsorted trash.

“So we stopped putting garbage bins in the parks,” said Masaki Fujihira, who oversees the promotion of trash sorting at Yokohama City’s family garbage division.

So there you have it. I’m a full-time rubbish sorter, with a sideline in high school English teaching!

The Advantages

What’s so great about being here?

Ridiculously cheap sushi

Here’s a quick video of a crowd of us at Genki Sushi Genki Sushi logo (courtesy of Lauren), wolfing down ¥105 plates of salmon, tuna, shrimp tempura - mmmm! For reference, that’s 63 euro cents for two pieces of sushi. AND you’re not limited to what happens to appear on the conveyor belt - you can order anything you like using a touch screen machine. Very non-confrontational, which is perfect for those of us who are struggling to say “my name is”, let alone order several varieties of sushi!

Code breaking
Japanese is seriously hard to read. And somehow, that’s part of the fun. Things drop through my mailbox every day; I collect them and bring them to teachers at my school for explanations. One which I was pretty sure was junk mail turned out to be a message from the town “lock checker” - he was congratulating me on the fact that my door was locked when he came around to check. It reminded me of the wallet inspector from the Simpsons - seems like a great excuse if you’re a thief and get caught!


So part of the fun is when my complete lack of understanding allows for big surprises - I guess at the meaning from context (the letter looked like junk mail), and the real meaning (lock checker) comes out of the blue and hits me for six!


The other fun part is that when you finally start to understand some of the symbols; the wiggly lines start to make some sense, and the feeling of having broken a code, the feeling of accomplishment, is well past any I’ve had with languages so far.

Pure Japanese madness
One of the big reasons I came here was because I felt it was so different, and it hasn’t disappointed. Let’s take, for example, washlets - toilets with a set of controls as shown below - they make a whirring sound and pop out a spray beneath you. Fine if you’re present, but I’ve heard of people testing how far it sprays if no-one is there, and the answer is: pretty far. I’m reliably informed that washlets in female restrooms have a “music button”, which should be pressed to mask any unladylike sounds. Apparently, it’s an environmental protection measure - ladies previously used extra flushes to mask these sounds, wasting huge amounts of water.

Washlet Controls

Next up is this guy, Kojima Yoshio. He appears on TV naked except for a Speedo, and sings stories about how something went wrong, but he doesn’t care - “demo sonna no kankee nee”! My students would gladly sit and watch me repeat that catchphrase all day, but something tells me it wouldn’t advance their English education too much! See below for a clip of him - takes a minute before he starts singing…


Online Videos by Veoh.com


The list of strange and interesting things goes on and on, but that’s a good start for now - let me know what you think!

Kickoff

OK, just over 2 months in and only now writing a first post - ridiculous!

Not quite as ridiculous as Charlotte and I yesterday at the Takeda Katsuyori parade though…

Charlotte and Dave as princess's maid and samurai