Amy and Brian's Big Japan Adventure

It was great having Amy and Brian at our place for a few nights. We got to show them around Fukuoka and Kumamoto, and they brought us a large supply of Stumptown coffee. We caught them soon after their arrival from Portland and made them accompany us to Kumamoto Castle, the shrine and temple at Dazaifu, and dinner with our friend Yamaguchi-sensei. We were both really relaxed to have friends from home here.

This is Amy and Ben getting cleaned up before entering Tenmangu Shrine at Dazaifu:

And this is Brian, Amy and me amidst the plum blossoms at Kumamoto-jo:

Ka-ra-o-ke

We finally tried Japanese karaoke, with the help of our new friends, the baker, Asao-san and his wife, Keiko-san. They have karaoke rooms here, for those who don't know, inside of multi-floored buildings stacked with rooms upon rooms of people singing. We even ordered dinner from the room, with a remote control, while we sang to flashing lights and a mirror ball. It was a magical experience, even if only for the fact that Ben seriously belted out the classic rock tunes and thoroughly impressed Asao with his Bob Dylan-esque vocals. My Aretha wasn't nearly as grand. Keiko has quite the pretty voice, which we heard as she sang sweet classic songs in Japanese. Asao loves many American tunes, and provided heartfelt renditions of songs by John Denver and Frank Sinatra (both of whom he met while working at a hotel in Tokyo in his youth), among others.

Cookin'

I took a cooking class last Sunday, and I wanted to show you what I made: Chinese dumplings filled with pork and ginger! It was fun, got to meet some new folks and try to understand them as they spoke Japanese. My favorite classmate was this adorable 11-year-old who was there with her mother. She danced throughout the whole lesson.

Fukoji Buddhist Temple

Living here can be so surreal. Yesterday, Keiko slept through our lesson and felt so bad (though it was not a big deal for us), that she took us out to kaiten-zushi today for lunch. A little Shinkansen brought us our special orders of grilled salmon nigiri and a conveyor belt brought the rest.

About 2 hours later, we went to our neighborhood Japanese sweet shop on a whim. You may remember this shop as the place we purchased our Christmas cake, where the baker used to work at the Savoy Hotel in London. Anyhow, he was happy to see us again and began telling us the story behind the sweets we held in our hands. Unexpectedly, he offered to drive us to a Buddhist temple halfway up Miike Mountain where there is a plum tree blooming (this was related to the sweets--all sweets have a story). This plum tree supposedly looks like a dragon lying down, his tail stretched out behind him. We were surprised by the invitation as this was only our second time talking to him, but we went anyway, because it sounded cool, and we're in Japan, so... Right before dusk, we went home to drop our groceries off, then back to his shop. He drove us to the temple, where he knew all the monks and we ran into one of my (Chrystal's) principals for a reason which remained unexplained. It was a school day. It was beautiful. We heard ten monks chanting in an old wooden structure behind the temple, and everything else was quiet.

On the drive back, he invited us to dinner at his house (remember, he cooked at the Savoy), but I made sure he asked his wife first. We'll meet him at the sweet shop in the morning to find out whether or not dinner is on.

Zadie Smith on Barack Obama

This is a great piece by the author of White Teeth and On Beauty, and one of Chrystal's favorite novelists: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22334. It starts off talking about George Bernard Shaw-who I know nothing about-and moves on to Obama and Shakespeare. Read it! It's good!

This Time Tomorrow

...we will have two of our wonderful Portland friends here with us! We are so excited!

Also, the board of education renewed their contract with our company, which probably means we'll be here until the end of July. We are relieved to finally have this information (as the school year ends in a month and I only have three days left at one of my schools...this news came not a moment too soon).

Big Cities

Tokyo's metropolitan area has 10 million more people than Mexico City! That's a big city!

1. Tokyo, Japan - 28,025,000
2. Mexico City, Mexico - 18,131,000
3. Mumbai, India - 18,042,000
4. Sáo Paulo, Brazil - 17, 711,000
5. New York City, USA - 16,626,000
6. Shanghai, China - 14,173,000
7. Lagos, Nigeria - 13,488,000
8. Los Angeles, USA - 13,129,000
9. Calcutta, India - 12,900,000
10. Buenos Aires, Argentina - 12,431,000

Aso Balloon Fest 2008

We went to an air balloon festival in Aso, the town at the center of the largest caldera in the world, in December. I believe it was mentioned in a previous post, but we never put any photos or videos up. It was fun, it was cold, and it was baffling. The festival was reminiscent of a county fair, without livestock but including cruddy fair food stands and local talent on the main stage (high schoolers performing choreographed hip-hop dances? check! clowns in square-dancing skirts making balloon animals and really bad physical comedy? again, check!) Almost felt like home. Almost. Below, please find a video of my principal testing out a Segway, the first opportunity of its kind in all of Kumamoto Prefecture! Note the clowns in the background.





Our day began with a long drive with the principal from Kattachi Junior High School, the school where I set up a penpal exchange with my former school out in Gresham, and his wife, a pharmacist who had just gotten off work (night shift!). Roads are windy, drivers are excrutiatingly slow and cautious. Our first stop was a "hike" at this beautiful spot, in the photo to the left. In the summer, it's popular for swimming.

Next we drove to a cow farm, which had no cows, but did have shetland ponies that I got to pet on the nose. The cows were elsewhere, but there was a wealth of cheeses and other dairy products, and Mr. and Mrs. Shiratani treated us to lunch. I had fabulous sukiyaki. Yummmmm. Then, Ben and I treated them to soft-serve ice cream. Fair? Not quite, but Japanese people like to treat guests, and, honestly, it's rude not to accept some of the time. They don't really go dutch here.

The balloon fest itself was sooo cold. We had to wait forever because it was too windy for the balloons to race. But once the "balloon illusion" began, we were happy that we had sat, chilled, on the cement steps of a small town in the middle of mountains.

Finally, the night was capped with an INCREDIBLE performance by a famous taiko drumming group. They were beautiful and strong. We loved them. I don't know how to express the awesome power, sound, and talent they had. Just trust me: amazing. Mr. Shiratani has plans to take us more places if we stick around. People here have really been so kind.

Tokyo Part III: Views

Oy. I 've been meaning to put these pictures up for a long time. So here they are. Pictures!

It seemed like every block in downtown Tokyo (Shibuya, Shinjuku, Ginza, around the Imperial castle, a huge area...) had at least one interesting ultramodern building. It was fun to walk around and gawk- the architecture was often playful, colorful, and not of monolithic stature. Despite being the largest metro area in the world (30 million), Tokyo is fairly low-built, with not a whole lot of true skyscrapers. There are a lot of buildings with around 20 or 30 floors, which definitely gives the pedestrian the tunneling-along-a-street feel, but it is not like walking through Manhattan.

Here is this one for the second time because it's so futurey. The building is the Asahi (one of Japan's 3 big breweries, and creator of the no. 1 beer in Japan Asahi Super-Dry) headquarters. The yellow blob symbolizes the future.

Here is a UFO on the manmade island of Odaiba in Tokyo Bay. The island is a strange place, preplanned and much more open than central Tokyo. There is a big theme mall for women, called "Venus Fort." Any takers, ladies? There is also a huge conference center, which we walked through (see fireman stuff below) which was like an airport without airplanes. The craziest building we were unable to get a photo of--The Fuji Building. It consisted of 2 towers with a sort of net of walkways/tubes between them. The crossing tubes and walkways supported an enormous orb. It was sort of ugly, sort of awesome.
OK, so this is pretty weird. First, an explanation-every year, as part of the New Year's celebrations, the Tokyo Fire Department puts on a huge exhibition, which includes craazy acrobatics on the top of old fashioned ladders. Firemen in Edo-period uniforms spin around precariously 40 feet in the air, with no ropes or harnesses. It was impressive. In addition to the traditional stuff, they put on big demonstrations, involving real fire, helicopters, fire engines, ambulances, a squad of big water-shooting fireboats, lots of sirens, and very serious sounding commentary over the outdoor soundsystem. They had several scenarios, the freakiest being what appeared to be a chemical attack, with a team of men in orange Hazmat suits. The photo above is of an enormous television screen, which showed the action for us folks who didn't arrive early enough to get good seats. The boys are on their fathers' shoulders.
Here's a building I think I once saw in a magazine in the US. Crazy jumble of little box-rooms.
Here is Chrystal in front of Kabuki-za, one of the (the?) oldest kabuki theaters in Tokyo. The plays are really long, like 4 or 5 hours long, but if you get seats on the very top, you can watch just an hour, which is what we did. Kabuki is.... errr.... I'm unqualified to speak about Kabuki. It's fascinating.
Here is Chrystal in Ginza. Bright lights!
Ginza... I think Christopher had a Radiohead poster taken in the middle of this intersection.
Here I am in the Golden Gai, a warren of tiny supercool bars near Shinjuku.
Here I am in an antique bookshop in Kanda's bookshop district. The little blue book I have in my hand was a really cool old fold-up map of the city, which sadly cost something like $600.
So, we went to the bar on the top floor of the Park Hyatt Hotel, which has a famous view of the city, and is higher than anything else around. It's the hotel they stay in in "Lost in Translation," and the bar is also the one in the movie. Anyhow, the view is unbelievable, and the pictures don't really do it justice. Tokyo goes all the way to the horizon, and the hotel hovers above Shinjuku.

And here is a view from the bottom. We were on the left-most of the 3 towers.
And, finally, here is Shibuya crossing, a crazy 5-way intersection with 5 gajillion people, gigantic televisions on all the buildings, and a million different songs going at once. Sensory overload!