Over the weekend I participated in the Noheji Go Club’s monthly Go tournament. I managed to win 3 games out of 5, which ended up being good enough for second place (there were seven people competing). My prize? The usual four boxes of tissues (awarded to everyone who enters the tournament) and three bars of soap.
Also over the weekend we celebrated the first day of Hanukkah with some friends in Towada City. Our host, Bryan, went to a nearby second-hand store and picked out a gift for everybody. Here’s the gift I received:
As you may recall, last year around this time we set off for a whirlwind tour of Tokyo, Kyoto, Nara, Hiroshima, and Miyajima. If I remember correctly, we never got around to writing up a proper post of some traditions of the Japanese holiday season. This school year I’ve been tutoring at lunch and last week one of my students prepared a report (in English, of course) about various customs and traditions surrounding , primarily, Christmas and New Year’s. Here are some highlights.
Christmas
Christmas in Japan is a largely secular holiday focusing on gift giving and spending time with family. Along with Halloween it’s becoming more commercially popular each year. Surprisingly one of the biggest traditions is eating KFC for dinner on Christmas Day. Recently a coworker of one of our friends said “If you want KFC on Christmas, you better get up early and order it in advance. Otherwise, you’re out of luck.” Afterwards families usually eat some sort of Christmas cake.
Children who receive gifts on Christmas usually have their presents set next to their bed while they sleep rather than underneath a Christmas tree.
New Year’s Traditions
New Year’s is easily Japan’s biggest holiday of the year. My student told me it is common to thoroughly clean one’s house on New Year’s Eve in order to feel clean within yourself as you prepare for a new start. Once the work is done, it’s time to relax. Before and for a brief period after World War II, children would often spend New Year’s playing with tako (a kite made out of paper and bamboo), koma (a kind of spinning top), and haigoita, a sort of badminton-like game where the winner gets to draw a picture on the loser’s face. It was also common to build kamakura, a sort of igloo-like snow house for recreational use.
Nowadays people find other ways to spend freetime during the holidays. Shopping is probably the most popular activity as many businesses advertise special end-of-the-year deals. I imagine it’s similar to Black Friday in America after Thanksgiving, but with less stampedes.
But there’s much more to New Year’s than consumerism. Obviously it’s a time for family and renewal. Sometime between the 31st of December and the 3rd of January, most people in Japan take time out to visit a temple where they offer a bit of money and say a prayer. It’s also common to send New Year’s postcards in the mail to family and friends. However my student told me that younger people tend to send text messages over their phone rather than take the time to mail postcards. As communication towers and satellites are bombarded with messages, it can sometimes take several minutes to send your midnight New Year’s greeting through your phone.
Puns of Good Fortune
Many symbols of New Year representing good fortune and happiness stem from puns. Tai (sea bream) is popular because it is in season and it is a pun on the word medetai, which my student told me means “happiness.” Similar puns exist for a vegetable called konbu and apparently ebi (shrimp) is served because of pun involving the word for “longevity.”
Also, if you have a dream simultaneously featuring Mt. Fuji, hawks, and eggplant, it is very good luck. The reasoning again is because of puns. “Fuji” sounds like “buji” which means “safe.” Hawk is taka and means clever and strong. Nasu (eggplant) is a play on the word for accomplish or success, also pronounced nasu.
My student told me about other aspects of the holiday season like decorations and food, but it’d be better to wait and explain that stuff when we have pictures available. Perhaps in the weeks to come we’ll show you what mochi cake, noshi, and kadomatsu look like. In the meantime, enjoy Christmas, New Year’s, and the other holidays of the season.
So we joined a trampoline club in Noheji. It’s fun. We take turns hopping up and down and tight, springy, super-classy trampolines with little kids and their parents. It’s not freestyle though. There are certain techniques and moves that we’re learning very slowly from our friend Kuni (hi, Kuni!). Observe:
Well, it’s the middle of November and Fall is heading out the door. The temperature has dropped significantly. I now wear a coat on my morning walk to school, but there’s still no ice so I can get a way with tennis shoes for at least another week. Another sign of winter’s arrival: The river I walk by every day is full of spawned out, black and white zombie salmon. While we’ve been teaching and attending seminars they’ve been facing upstream, swimming just enough to stay in the same place. It’s as if the river has become their treadmill for training for the afterlife.
We’ve been busy. Fall is definitely the time of year where we have the most classes to teach. There are also quite a few seminars to attend, most of which are helpful and/or awesome. Just last week Julie and I went to the Misawa City to help some high schoolers get ready for an upcoming school trip to Hawaii. The day was spent practicing English conversation and learning more about Hawaiian culture. In addition to helping out with homestay simulations, shopping, and calling a hotel, we taught the students a little bit about the Hawaiian language. It was a very fun day.
What’s on the horizon? More work, more use of our heater, probably less driving around, and lots of warm drinks. Oh, and a blog post about the Noheji Trampoline Club.
On Friday I went to school dressed as Abraham Lincoln and gave away pennies and candy to teachers and students in my free time. Students would come up to me as I roamed the halls and ask me, “Trick or treat?” After I ran out of pennies I searched my pockets to see if I had anything else to give. I found a plastic baggy with tiny pieces of paper containing random English words. It was from a lesson we did a while back on parts of the body. For the rest of the afternoon, whenever a student would ask me for Halloween candy, I would give them a piece of paper that said “face” or “knee” or “ankle.” Their response? More often than not: No thank you.
You may remember reading about my adventure to Tokyo with my office last year. This year, we went to the bordering prefectures of Iwate and Akita, touring around from stop to stop by bus. I kept a journal during the trip, which I will take from heavily for this post.
Saturday, 6 a.m. My alarm is sounding, but I decide to sleep for 10 minutes more, knowing full well that I’ll only have 30 minutes left to get out the door. I’m scrambling, when I finally do get up, to gather my things and eat something before leaving. Taylor patiently waits, in sweats and his scruffy morning beard, by the front door as I rack my brain for anything I might be forgetting. I’m leaving later than I wanted, so we both run out to the car, which we have to park in a lot on a different block than our apartment. I worry the whole way along the drive to my office, thinking everyone must be there already, waiting.
7:15 a.m. Right on time! No one is at the office. We drive into an empty parking lot. No bus in sight. A bad feeling creeps into my stomach as I automatically start to think back on the directions I received about meeting up before the trip. I try to figure out where it was that I got something wrong. Were we not supposed to meet at the office? Was it 7:15 p.m. last night that we were supposed to meet? I call a coworker. She assures me that I have arrive first. Relief.
7:30 We set off on the bus after everyone arrives. We pick up more office members at 2 other stops. The kanji (aka trip organizers) start passing around snacks and drinks and tell us about what’s in store for the day.
8:30 The sun is bright through the morning mist. The bus is full with the bubbling sound of Japanese conversation.
First stop: Bento lunch at Kamaku Lando.
We also had to sample the famous yakisoba at this stop.
We broke off into groups and I joined in with the ladies for an adventure through Wonder Castle.
Balancing through Wonder Castle.
Little and big people room!
“Humans”
The one-armed handstand on a table room!
Sky diving!
That guy was really worried about his elephant.
Fish friends, swam right out of the pictures.
After a well-needed, hour-long nap on the bus, we stopped at a museum made from an old samurai dwelling. We picked out some souvenirs and headed back to the bus. We drove through a twisting mountain road, with no lack of the beautiful fall foliage that had followed us throughout the morning and afternoon, until we reached Tazawa Lake; the deepest lake in Japan. Our hotel was further up the mountain and we arrived just as the sun was setting.
We settle into our ryokan style hotel rooms and then we had dinner. Oh, how we had dinner.
This was my hotel room. In the evening when the guests leave the rooms, the hotel elves come out of hiding and quickly and efficiently move the table and chairs somewhere and lay out all of the futons for the guests.
Here’s the hotel dining room. Each table has a basket of food ready to be grilled on a fire at the center of the diners. This particular evening there was a pot of bear meat and rice dumpling soup hanging over one of the two fires. The soup fire was also surrounded with whole fish on a stick. The room was toasty warm and super relaxed. Many people chose to wear the yukata (light kimono) provided by the hotel. It’s comfortable and easy to change in and out of when visiting the onsen (public bath) also at the hotel.
This is what my place setting looked like before I started eating.
Here’s one of the many rounds of food grilling in front of us. The chicken is stuffed with gyoza meat and the mushrooms are shiitake with a pepper in the center.
Here’s my place setting right before my food coma set in…
After dinner, the hotel’s super hot and sulfuric onsen relaxed our muscles. I couldn’t stay in longer than a few minutes at a time because it was so hot. After the onsen, more food (!) and visiting until we were all too sleepy to not turn in for the night.
Day 2
Sunday, 6:30 a.m. Again, I push snooze to sleep for another 10 more minutes. Then I remember the onsen, so I cut my snooze short and gather my things together to head out for a morning soak.
Breakfast was fish, soup, nori, mushroom/miso salad, slimy bundle of fibrous seaweed drenched in vinegar or possible pickled, more pickled mystery vegetables, super salty fish eggs, tea, rice, and orange juice. Yum!
We had some extra time in the morning, so a group of us walked around the woods near the hotel. Here’s what we saw:
The overlook.
Close up.
On the bus again. Our first stop is a handmade goods shop. We spend an hour and ten minutes there watching people work on their crafts: iron ware, painted wooden horses, dyed fabric, and yummy treats. A few of my coworkers tried their own hand at the yummy treats.
The area had a really pretty lookout point where a snapped up some more autumn leaf pictures.
Next stop was a sake factory. After a tour through a big building with many large vats and a strong, strong smell, we were sent through the souvenir shop for taste testing. I bought a bottle of amezake; a super sweet, non-alcoholic drink made from rice. Although it tastes really sweet, there is no sugar added.
Last stop was a late-afternoon lunch. We ate at a restaurant famous for its wanko soba. Wanko soba is served bite-to-bite, so as you slurp up some noodles from your bowl, emptying it, a server is standing next to you and immediately splashes another mouthful into your bowl. The servers hold a tray filled with small bowls of these (big) bite sized servings, and stack all the empty bowls next to you so you can count how many you eat. 10 of these bowls is about one normal sized bowl of noodles. When you are full, you cover your bowl so that it can’t be refilled. This sounds reasonable, but the servers are very quick and there is some skill involved in managing to eat your last bite and then quickly cover your bowl before the server can refill it. They really do try to beat you to it and will hold a refill bowl right next to you when they see you are reaching for the lid. I stopped after 35 bowls, and the record for our group was over 80 bowls. The record for that restaurant was a guy who ate over 500 bowls.
I’ve mentioned in earlier blogs the flower arranging class that I have been taking at the agriculture school where I also teach one beginning English class. This past weekend, the school had a huge festival featuring the different classes and what they have been learning.
The Kado (flower arranging) class spent the day before making arrangements to be on display in one of the classrooms during the festival. Here’s what we came up with:
This week I wanted to incorporate some sort of Halloween theme into my lessons without going over the top. I asked Julie for some advice and she came up with a great idea: Describe a monster to your students (It has one big eye, a triangle head, snakes for hair, and three arms, etc) and have them draw it on a piece of paper. It was a perfect warm-up before diving into some more conversational English.
However, one of the classes where I conducted the activity was a little restless. They’re the kind of class that quiets down when you tell them to and then thirty seconds later start back up again. They’re good kids, they’re not trying to be mean to me and the other teacher, they just can’t help themselves.
Anyway, during the warm-up I told them to be quiet a few times and decided to change it up a little. In a quiet, almost whispering voice I told them that we needed to be quiet because we didn’t want to wake up the monster. The room went completely silent and I had their full attention. It was great, but the weird thing was that they had no idea what I just said. I’m pretty sure I could have said anything (for example, “Yesterday I watched the trailer for “Tron 2″ and was disappointed because it looks like they’re trying too hard.”) and the students would have reacted the same way.
The teacher I was working with was equally surprised and when I looked at her she was trying very hard not to laugh, which made me laugh, which made the students laugh, and thirty seconds later they resumed their good-natured but disruptive small talk.
This weekend Julie and I hit the road to catch a glimpse at the fall foliage before the leaves all fell to the ground. Our trip included stops at Mt. Hakkoda, Oirase Stream/Gorge, and Lake Towada.
We took a ropeway up to the top of Mt. Hakkoda. We missed the peak of the colors by a couple weeks but it was still amazing.
View from the tram.
View from the top of Mt. Hakkoda. In the distance is Mutsu Bay and Aomori City.
Another view from the top, this time facing inland.
After the mountain we took a stroll down to the Oirase Stream/Gorge.
Our last stop was Lake Towada, the deepest lake in Japan.
We also did a fair amount of driving on the trip. Here’s a video of us careening through a mountain road looking at foliage and listening to Alphawezan.
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